With the Trump administration placing a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency, shutting down its Twitter feed, forcing employees off their individual accounts and dismantling Web pages with climate-change information, Badlands went rogue.

“Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years,” it declared in one of at least four tweets.

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Admirers went nuts. They created a hashtag, #Badasslands, in an ode to the defiance and dubbed the park Breaking Badlands after the TV show “Breaking Bad.” Within hours, the park gained a huge audience.

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But in late afternoon, the tweets suddenly vanished.

NPR reporter Nathan Rott was one of dozens of followers who captured four tweets in a screenshot and posted a picture.

According to a National Park Service official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, the tweets are believed to have been posted by a former employee at the park in Interior, S.D., who still had access to the account.

Those tweets “were posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account,” said the official. “The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized that their account had been compromised.”

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Memories, however, can’t be erased. Twitter hailed the tweets as heroic.

Badlands had previously stepped out front, too. On Friday, as Trump was being inaugurated, Badlands also tweeted: “#ClimateChange has implications for naval force structure and operations. Factors driving this include: Water & resource challenges” @USNavy.” The line appeared to come from a report on climate change issued by the Navy.

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https://twitter.com/pdobrow/status/824028674458386433

Kayla Epstein, Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

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