Earth Day has long been a moment to take stock of what we stand to lose. This year we would like to draw attention to a quieter crisis: the disappearance of the scientific record itself. Climate and weather datasets are being removed from government servers, taken offline without warning, lost to institutional collapse, and buried where no one can reach them.
Some of the most important data in the world never makes headlines when it disappears. It quietly ends up locked in inaccessible institutional repositories, stranded on personal hard drives after a project's funding runs out, or simply deleted when a government agency changes direction. The researchers who collected it move on. The URLs go dark. The record is gone.
In 2025, the federal scientific record began to disappear. NOAA retired its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database. The EPA deleted its Climate Change Indicators website and proposed eliminating its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Programme. Funding for the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, the longest continuous atmospheric record in history, was placed under serious threat. Seventeen critical federal datasets spanning disaster risk, air quality, renewable energy, and emissions data were retired, removed, or put at risk of elimination.
These data sets will now be permanently preserved on Panthaion, verified, citable, and impossible to remove as part of our “Endangered Data Sets” listing. We took steps to ensure they are ready for AI/ML integration so that everyone can build upon them for years to come.
In the spirit of Earth Day, we want to do even more. We will also be open-sourcing the work our team has conducted in accelerating global renewable energy infrastructure, adding that research directly to the ecosystem alongside these rescued public datasets. Please keep an eye out for new data sets and algorithms from the team in the coming weeks.
At breakfast today my daughters were asking what is Earth Day, and why do we celebrate it. For me, much of what I do is to ensure they have a vibrant world to inherit. Please join us in moving the climate discussion further so that we can ensure a better world for the generations to come.
These aren't abstract datasets. They are the baseline against which every future climate measurement is compared. Lose the baseline, lose the ability to understand change. We're not letting that happen.
For everyone in this community: if you know of datasets at risk, researchers sitting on hard drives of unfunded project data, or institutional archives going quiet, please reach out or upload directly. That is exactly what Panthaion is here for.
Proud to be building this alongside this team.
It might seem weird to think of datasets as "endangered" at first (usually that term makes me think of tigers and rhinos), but the more I think about it, the more apt of a descriptor that term becomes. For a lot of people, data is this concrete thing: you get data, you put it online, and then it stays there forever. But clearly things aren't so black and white nowadays...
Going through the new filter has given me lots of food for thought, that's for sure: https://panthaion.org/marketplace/?q=&search_mode=keyword&content=dataset&sort=relevance&endangered=1
I'll count this as the one time I hope an "endangered" list continues to grow!
It is an interesting case-study for how we view the historical significance of our data - or the very least - the access to data. It's incredible how 'society' treats datasets or information based on the current government, industrial climate or priorities.
To the point Panthaion as a platform is making - how is society supposed to respond to shifting policies/needs when the data used to link our past to our present (real, public-informing data) is broken-up, lost or gapped. We need to be able to access the data behind unfunded work, shifting priorities that leave projets vacant or scientists that move on due to new governing bodies or policies in place so that we can build on it and find solutions that may not have existed or time that may have run out.
I think it's important to view data, past or present, not just as the simply 'preservation of information' but as important infrastructure that can be built up and added to - especially in industries that require constant attention, research and action - like climate.
Given how significantly different our world looks on Earth Day last year...10 years ago...even 50 years ago, it has never been more important to preserve and protect the work and data which we use understand and predict how we can protect our environment.
@James McCowell
Agreed! We're at a special point in time that climate data can be processed to make extremely helpful and long term insights. It's important to keep the feed going, keep it accessible and let people build positive solutions for the world.
When datasets disappear, longterm trends become harder to validate, policies become harder to justify, and scientific trust erodes. Thank you for taking the initiative to preserve these datasets, it feels like a necessary countermeasure to this silent loss of data.
