Claire G. Griffin
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polargriffin.bsky.social
Claire G. Griffin
@polargriffin.bsky.social
3.6K followers 2.1K following 640 posts
Asst Prof, Ex-pat Texan, biogeocheminist and arctic scientist, excited about organic matter and rivers. Water science, fluffy pet photos, #QueerinSTEM, and crafty things.
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polargriffin.bsky.social
Claire G. Griffin @polargriffin.bsky.social · Feb 24
I have been making a playlist of Fresh Water Songs for my Hydrology class, with some help from friends. It's pretty great! Please enjoy.

open.spotify.com/playlist/7jl...
Fresh Water Songs
Playlist · cofertest · 70 items · 8 saves
open.spotify.com
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
sanho.bsky.social
“Gawande noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.“
November 27, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
zacklabe.com
Nearly the entire Canadian Arctic Archipelago recorded temperatures warmer than 5°C above the 1981-2010 baseline in October 2025. And as I shared yesterday, sea ice in the Baffin Bay is currently a record low for the date... Hudson Bay too (I'll share that next).

Data from doi.org/10.24381/cds...
Regional map of the Canadian Arctic showing October 2025 temperature anomalies. Most areas are warmer than average. Anomalies are calculated to a 1981-2010 baseline with red being warmer than average, and blue being colder than average.
November 25, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
shawn1959.bsky.social
Public land grant universities with a mission to serve the residents of their respective states are the great economic equalizers. So of course Republicans and billionaires want to destroy them. 😖
November 23, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
alanallport.bsky.social
Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.
jackiantonovich.bsky.social Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 3d
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
joolia.bsky.social
the nuzzi story is fun and all but at the center of it is the elevation of a man who has dedicated his life to making children catch preventable diseases to a position where he can enact harm at enormous scale
ddiamond.bsky.social Dan Diamond @ddiamond.bsky.social · 7d
CDC has overhauled its website to assert that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim”
Autism and Vaccines QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS PAGE 2 OF 9 | ALL PAGES J For Everyone NOV. 19, 2025 KEY POINTS • The claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. • Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities. HHS Research on Plausible Biologic Mechanisms between Vaccines and Autism HHS will evaluate plausible biologic mechanisms between early childhood vaccinations and autism. Mechanisms for further investigation include the impacts of aluminum adjuvants, risks for certain children with mitochondrial disorders, harms of neuroinflammation, and more. * The header "Vaccines do not cause autism" has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.
November 20, 2025 at 3:19 AM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
prideinstem.bsky.social
Happy International Day of LGBTQIA+ People In STEM!

How are you celebrating it?

#LGBTQSTEMDay #PrideInSTEM
The logo for LGBTQ+STEM Day, with the hashtags below and the date 18 of November, over a rainbow background
November 18, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
stephenbheard.bsky.social
Occasional reminder that if you're interested in the history and practice of scientific writing, and folks who give advice about scientific writing, I made a starter pack: go.bsky.app/TwZVnjU
November 18, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
stacescases2.bsky.social
Like some kind of grim Omen of things to come, #Hawaii ’s #Kilauea volcano just unleashed a MASSIVE WING SHAPED eruption with lava fountains soaring 1,500+ feet high
November 17, 2025 at 7:04 AM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
doktrock.bsky.social
⚒️🧪 Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (among other programs) to be eliminated at University of Nebraska-Lincoln #UNL. A tragedy all around. #Geosciences
ljelkins.bsky.social Dr. Lynne Elkins @ljelkins.bsky.social · 16d
They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable.

If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.
Final Budget Reduction Plan | Budget Process | Nebraska
budgetprocess.unl.edu
November 17, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
ljelkins.bsky.social
They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable.

If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.
Final Budget Reduction Plan | Budget Process | Nebraska
budgetprocess.unl.edu
November 10, 2025 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
donmoyn.bsky.social
Trump's campaign to kill an industry where America runs a massive trade surplus is succeeding
November 17, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
mikesacks.bsky.social
This whole piece is all the actual horribles on parade, and this one is just infuriating
April 7 Brian McEntire, Civil Rights Division: My goal was always to become an attorney in the Civil Rights Division. That was my dream. I ended up working a lot on fire department cases. In Cobb County, Ga., we got information that even though African Americans and whites were applying for positions at about an equal rate over the previous decade, 90 percent of the hires had been white and 10 percent had been African American. And we didn't quite understand why that was. So we did an investigation and found out that there was a credit check that was disproportionately knocking out African Americans, particularly for student loan debt. And when we asked them why they were doing that, their response was essentially, Well, if a firefighter is deeply in debt and he's fighting a fire, he might steal grandma's pearls. So we brought suit. In February, we got a note saying that the attorney general wanted us to withdraw the case. The next day, division leadership insisted that we put additional language in the notice of dismissal that implied it was all about reverse discrimination. I didn't know, quite frankly, if I could sign it. If I have to say what I argued before was illegal, then I could have been accused of misleading the court, which could have ended up with me being disciplined, sanctioned and my bar license revoked. So I did not sign it. My colleagues didn't sign it. They pulled us all into a room, and we were all prepared to get fired because none of us were going to sign. My boss signed a modified version of the notice of withdrawal on our behalf. We also had a racial-discrimination case involving the sole African American attorney working for the Mississippi State Senate, who, during the years she worked there, was paid less than half of what her similarly situated white colleagues were making. It was as clear-cut a case of disparate racial treatment you could find. The Senate stalled the case until Trump's appointees could come in and order our section to drop it. When you talk about the rule of law and treating people fairly and equally, that's obviously a slap in the face.
November 17, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Jim Ryan wrote a letter to UVA detailing his "resignation" and I'm gonna get some fresh tea before I read it because I feel pretty certain I'm gonna be filled with righteous anger by the end

I'll do a thread but here's the full letter provided by the chronicle

www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...
Jim Ryan letter
www.documentcloud.org
November 14, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
genandgenes.bsky.social
Are you located in the DC-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York corridor?

Have you always wanted to have your very own 11 foot long papier-mâché hammerhead shark?

Now available for free!

Perfect for museums, community centers, or your living room!

Save this lovely creature from imminent destruction!
Picture of shark sculpture by MICA student Mayali Geyling. Picture of shark sculpture by MICA student Mayali Geyling.
November 14, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
dangaristo.bsky.social
BREAKING: NSF will be relocating to the "Randolph Building," about half a mile from its current location in Alexandria, where they will co-locate with the US Patent and Trademark Office. The lease will begin January 1, 2026.

Below is a transcription of an email shared with me by NSF staff.
U.S. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR ALEXANDRIA, VA 22314 STAFF MEMORANDUM Fri 11/14/2025 10:47 AM OD 25-68 November 14, 2025 ORGANIZATION SUBJECT: U.S. National Science Foundation Headquarters Update Today, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is announcing the award of a lease for the new U.S. National Science Foundation headquarters building at 401 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA. This building, known as the "Randolph Building" is a part of the Carlyle Innovation Campus, where we will co-locate with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The new building is approximately 0.5 miles East of our current headquarters and approximately 0.3 miles away from the King Street-Old Town Metro and Virginia Railway Express (VRE) station. Many of you may already be familiar with the campus. We expect the new lease to begin on January 1, 2026, and it is our intent to move as quickly as possible so that we minimize costs to the agency. GSA is working on the overall schedule, and there is preparatory work that needs to be done to get the building ready for our occupancy, including cabling, furniture, and other basic modifications. We will be updating you on those plans as they are available. We intend to use all available flexibilities, including telework, as we execute the move in the first quarter of 2026. Thank you in advance for your patience, and we hope to have additional details for you at the town hall next week. Brian Stone Chief of Staff Performing the Duties of the Director
November 14, 2025 at 4:03 PM
polargriffin.bsky.social
I recently re-read Forgotten Beasts of Eld, a beautiful little book.

The cover of the paperback copy i had in high school is the first image. The cover of the current Amazon listing is the second.

What happened??? This half-assed photoshop slop can't have been worth it.
An illustrated cover of the Forgotten Beasts of Eld from a couple decades ago. Its a painting of a young fair-haired woman in profile with a falcon and green dragon on the foreground, and a boar and black swan in the midground, in front of a mountainous landscape A badly photoshop cover of the Forgotten Beasts of eld. It still features mountains, a blond woman, a green dragon, and a falcon but it looks very poorly designed and even the text is a little hard to read because of the color choices
November 14, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
stevevladeck.bsky.social
Jim Ryan's letter is not just surreal and troubling; it provides a series of deeply sobering lessons—about the perils facing public universities today; about what it means to "work with" this Department of Justice; & about what leadership does (and doesn't) entail at this especially fraught moment.
joefore.bsky.social Joe Fore @joefore.bsky.social · 13d
Former UVA president Jim Ryan, who resigned over the summer due to pressure from the Trump Administration, just shared this 12-page letter with the Faculty Senate, detailing his experience with the Board of Visitors and DOJ.

It's a surreal--and troubling--read.

drive.google.com/file/d/1Is6x...
November 14, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
jacquelyngill.bsky.social
The thing is, 1.5 degrees was was an unrealistic target from the start. The only way earth system models could make it work was by overshooting the target, getting to 0 emissions, and then devoting 2-3x the land area of India to carbon removal later in the century. We’d already warmed 1.2 degrees C.
australia.theguardian.com Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · Oct 28
Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned. 🔗👉 www.theguardian.com/environment/...
November 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
rallidaerule.bsky.social
A reminder, to myself and others, as our federal colleagues return to work, the backlog will be huge, and they didn't just come back from vacation, they are coming back from something that has impacted each of them in their own way

I know I am eager to talk to many of them, but lets all be patient
November 13, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social
I try my hardest to stop buying books but sometimes it is just too difficult.
A Folio Edition of the memoir Pigs I Have Known
November 10, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
zacklabe.com
Another community resource loss: "Sunset of the IRI Data Library" 😔
IRI – International Research Institute for Climate and Society | Data Library Sunset
iri.columbia.edu
November 12, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
davekarpf.bsky.social
There was an NYT piece last week about the Sierra Club, and (by extension) the current state of the climate movement.

I think they got three big things wrong.

davekarpf.substack.com/p/every-gene...
Every generation gets to recreate the environmental movement to suit its own purposes
Some big-picture reactions to a recent NYT piece
davekarpf.substack.com
November 12, 2025 at 1:17 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
climatologist49.bsky.social
Map showing which 3-month period has warmed the most over the last 75 years. For most places in North America - except for the U.S. Rocky Mountains and West Coast - one of the cold season periods is the one that has warmed the most.
@alaskawx.bsky.social
November 11, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Claire G. Griffin
secondnaturemb.bsky.social
I really need to get to bed, but I just poked my head out the back door again. This is the view from my deck. All of this is looking south. When the geomagnetic storms are like this, the oval overshoots me and stretches into the US, which is why so many are seeing it tonight. #aurora
A bright red glow reaches up into the darkness, illuminating the silhouettes of tall slightly scraggly, spruce trees Swirls of green and red light sweep down from the sky, lighting up the forest and contrasting against the Stark silhouettes of trees Dramatic swirls of green and red light swirl down from the middle of the sky, starkly contrasting against the bear of Poplar, tall Spruce trees. Still more dramatic curtains of light sweep down from above in sheets of green and red. The tall bear poplars and spruce spires our starkly silhouetted.
November 12, 2025 at 5:16 AM