Fire update: thanks to heroic efforts by contractors & USF CMS ops staff, my group got most of our samples. Yesterday books emerged. Waiting for space allocations for prep labs & offices. Instruments & buildings will take longer; advocating for mobile labs in short to mid term. Funding still needed.

The White House has cut or frozen billions in scientific research funds that had been approved by Congress. It’s an assault on the rule of law and on the security, health, and prosperity of all Americans. bit.ly/42ytB9B

Greetings from Hawkins Marine lab here in the upside down. Yesterday we stood at the gate and and recieved samples from the relatively protected walkin cooler. The building is red tagged; unclear how much can be recovered. So many awesome people are working really hard to help us. I’m very greatful.

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

As many know, there was a massive fire at USF CMS. The building held offices, labs, equipment, etc and is a total loss. We are most concerned about the finanpcial losses of our students. Please consider donating to the official go fund me supporting our graduate students.

So this happened today. My office, lab, husbands office, lab… students offices… not great. Tough times ahead

Well the day had arrived. It’s the first time since 2002 that I have not had governmental (UK or US) funding for my research program… Anyone else here with me? Any ideas about what to do next?

The story here is that Congress rejected Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the National Science Foundation, but Trump is gutting the agency anyway. The by-now classic Russ Vought play of treating Congress as an irrelevancy. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

All 22 members of the board that advises and oversees the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a leading funder of basic science, were fired on 24 April without explanation. go.nature.com/42tkCGv

If I were a fired NSB member, I would be exploring opportunities to litigate actions taken by NSF that legally require board input

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

Wouldn't it be cool to invest trillions of dollars into a technology that would actually make society better? Maybe we can call it “HI” — Human Intelligence. Instead of “data centers”, we could fund “schools”. Instead of *stealing* art, literature, and science, we help people *create* it. Crazy!

My Gen X self had to be notified of successful launch and splashdown. Still traumatized by the live action I experienced in 5th grade. Yay Artimis II!

The obeying in advance is so odd.

#nokings in St Pete FL with @oceanandclimate.bsky.social and @drtrevorwilliams.bsky.social. Summary: more people, more men 40-60, not enough 18-30 year olds. More honking and fewer fingers. Florida is shifting (I think).

Email your senators to urge them not to confirm Jim O’Neill as Director of the National Science Foundation. He's not a scientist, has no relevant expertise, promoted vaccine misinformation, helped gut the CDC, and his Silicon Valley ties raise questions about protecting the public interest. (1/2🧵)

This person should be fired from their job, because they clearly don’t value teaching or learning. Gross. My students bring me the greatest joy and are the reason I do what I do.

In its hunt for critical minerals, the US is misconstruing what is and is not America’s theconversation.com/in-its-hunt-...

Come on Thermo… seriously?

As a kid, my great aunt Mary woods hole (family nickname) gave me a book each Thanksgiving. The books were always about adventures (swallows and amazons was a fave) and she would write that I could do anything and be anything I wanted to be. ADHD and oceanography must be genetic.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Controversial opinion. Let Gen X have some leadership responsibility. Watching this same dynamic in all facets of my life at the moment, with all the same issues

Uhhh… well maybe we can all be raptured and escape this hellhole timeline.

Meanwhile, many of us have to think about how we wind down our lab operations in the next month, while proposals languish in purgatory. For what?

Meanwhile, polar scientists are running out of money, have proposals sitting in NSF purgatory for over a year and crickets… I’m about ready to throw in the towel on my science career.

Me in Lincoln MA, 1978

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

Again, not surprising… 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

NEW – Q&A: How Trump is threatening climate science in Earth’s polar regions | @daisydunne.carbonbrief.org Read here: buff.ly/j5Gbrmb

I’ve never considered the Reveille a warship, but here we are. Glad we spent all that money on a pier to fit the Palmer…

Very proud of this one: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

My super amazing students (minus two who had a meeting) and lab tech. I’m so grateful to all of them for all of their hard work and dedication to science. Also, they are so much fun!

Techno-optimism around AI reveals the contempt these CEOs and tech bros have for the work most of us do. They think writing, thinking and art can all be automated by AI because *they* can’t do any of those things.

It was transforming the biggest NFL stage in the world into a sugar cane plantation that did it for me. Like, the multiple layers of turning an American icon into a plantation and highlighting the history of exploitation of Black and Brown bodies by the NFL and American colonialism simultaneously?

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.

We seem to be at this level of dumb…

The hazards of failing first-year biology: you invade the wrong pole. 🇦🇶 🐧 🇬🇱 🐻‍❄️

This week has been a year

Dear academic journals, I don’t want your AI research tools and summaries. I want easy access … looking at you GeoscienceWorld…

NSF, NOAA, and USAID cost too much but we have the money to run Venezuela… ok…. Make it make sense.

If your position is that regime change should be forced on countries where the president does not respect democratic norms and regularly kidnaps opponents using an officially sanctioned paramiliatary, have I got news for you about your position on the United States

CIA led regime change in Latin America feels very 1980s.

A Gigaton is a billion tons. Or 1000000000000 kg or 2204622621848.78 lbs More than 100 of those lost from Antarctic and Greenland land ice (not sea ice, which is different) each and every year in recent decades. That's the part not replaced by snowfall that helps drive up sea levels.

Happy solstice peeps!

What the absolute [expletive] was that?!?

Huh, this doesn’t sound like the NSF I’ve experienced.

What am I going to do with a whole week where no one bothers me??? The possibilities are endless but really involve one option. Not going to AGU is a gift.

This year, the NSF funded 35% fewer grants in geoscience, with 25% less money. Meanwhile, the Office of the Director spent almost three times as much money as in a regular year. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Just when this evening couldn’t get worse, a cockroach leaped out of the medicine cabinet and into my pants. I ran to the closet screaming, took off my pants, and it ran down my leg, & into the pants. My husband found me in the closet, half naked, screaming, and jumping up & down on a pair of pants.