probably last year (climate.colostate.edu/blog/index.p...) but both are toward the tails of the distribution for sure

this was happening with American Meteorological Society journals last year, from a combo of staff departures and a new online system. (It wasn't good!) I think it's mostly been resolved now. Perhaps something similar at whatever publisher you submitted to?

if the bar gets filled, might they add a "share on bluesky" button??

perhaps - though that is also *much* steeper terrain so the topography seems like it would be much more important there. That may be more like the Leh flood example that Bob Houze talked about.

I’ve got a lot of these but none of them can really capture this game. This may be the closest

I’ve used Adobe Illustrator since grad school, but it’s getting pretty expensive (see the back page of the latest print Onion). Inkscape is an open source alternative that some of my students have used. And as others have said, Canva is becoming very popular (haven’t used it much myself)