Future Tense

Badlands National Park Tweets About Climate Change, Deletes Tweets

The Badlands National Park on Oct. 1, 2013. 

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

On Tuesday afternoon, the Badlands National Park Twitter account posted four tweets about climate change, and then deleted them hours later. Screenshots below:

The tweets follow a kerfuffle on Friday in which the National Park Service Twitter account retweeted an aerial photo of the national mall, pointing out how sparsely attended Prsident Trump’s inauguration was compared to President Obama’s in 2009. As Gizmodo reported, the National Park service was then “ordered by its Washington support office to ‘immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice.’ ”

Many on Twitter saw the @BadlandsNPS tweets as a brave protest against the directive, and against the Trump administration’s stance on climate change.

At least NASA Climate, whose Twitter bio reads “Rocket science isn’t enough; we’re climate scientists, too,” is still able to tweet about climate change (for now).

If you run any of these Twitter accounts, or know who does, email us at tips@slate.com.

Update, Jan. 24, 8:25 p.m.: According to BuzzFeed, the tweets were posted by a former employee who was not authorized to use the account, and Badlands National Park was not told to remove them.