State budget cuts in Florida have apparently claimed another victim: the geology and oceanography departments at Florida State University will merge, according to several emails making the rounds. Munir Humayun, an associate professor in the geology department, reports that FSU has terminated five tenured faculty and kept on seven in the geology department. They will move with the meteorology department, and the remnants of oceanography, into a new department of earth and atmospheric studies.

The faculty cut include three assistant professors who were hired within the past year, Humayun reports. Who gets laid off and who stays can be dictated more by union rules than by other factors, as Florida-based writer Mark Schrope reported recently in Nature on the budget troubles facing universities in the state.