Author: Kim Martineau

Kim Martineau, science writer for The Earth Institute, became a journalist to discover the world, explore the human condition and reveal the truth hiding in a string of facts. As a newspaper writer for the Times Union in Albany, NY, and The Hartford Courant in Connecticut, she wrote about crime and punishment, small town government, higher education and the environment. She was twice named a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists for profiling a transgender student at Yale and a Nobel Prize-winning chemist accused of stealing the rights to his own invention. A story that she broke about an antique map dealer caught slicing maps out of ancient books at a Yale library received national attention. She lives in New York City with her husband and a rabbit possibly old enough to qualify for the book of Guinness World Records.

Contest Aims to Bring ‘Dark Data’ into Digital Archives

by | 4.29.2013 at 11:42am | 1 Comment
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The scientific publisher Elsevier and a data archiving facility at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are offering $5,000 and a trophy to the person with the best example of how data-preservation techniques are being used to advance new discoveries in the earth sciences.

Plumbing the Deep Ocean Floor

by | 4.2.2013 at 4:24pm
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A video profile of the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository—the world’s largest collection of deep sea sediments, some as old as 100 million years. The 19,000 cores, largely collected by Lamont’s own research vessels, are a central resource for the global scientific community, which uses them for studies of earth’s past and current environment, especially in regard to climate change.

A Library of Giant Landslides

by | 4.1.2013 at 11:27am
The 2009 Xiaolin landslide in Taiwan killed 400 people but went undetected for two days. (Xinhua News Agency)

A new method for detecting big landslides is allowing scientists to understand the dynamics of these elusive events almost instantly, without traipsing to remote mountains or scrambling up rugged peaks months, or even years, later. In a recent study in the journal Science, Göran Ekström and Colin Stark, geophysicists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, have catalogued the 29 largest landslides since 1980 using satellite images and recordings from a global network of seismic instruments. A third of the avalanches are documented now for the first time.

What Dust May Have To Do With Earth’s Rapidly Warming Poles

by | 1.9.2013 at 11:31am | 1 Comment
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As earth’s climate warms, scientists have tried to understand why the poles are heating up two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Airborne dust, it turns out, may play a key role.

Smaller Colorado River Projected for Coming Decades, Study Says

by | 12.23.2012 at 2:28pm
The Colorado River irrigates crops throughout the U.S. Southwest.

Some 40 million people depend on the Colorado River Basin for water but warmer weather from rising greenhouse gas levels and a growing population may signal water shortages ahead.

Clues from Last Ice Age May Hint at Drying Ahead for Some Regions

by | 12.6.2012 at 9:16pm
Aaron Putnam sampling a boulder rooted in the Tachanggay Tso moraine. Drukso Gangri is in the background. (David Putnam)

In the spectacular collapse of ice sheets as the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago scientists hope to find clues for what regions may grow drier from human caused global warming. In a talk Thursday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, Aaron Putnam, a postdoctoral scholar at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, painted a picture of earth’s dramatic transformation as seen in climate records extracted from ancient cave formations, ice cores, lake shorelines and glacial moraines.

Huge Landslide Linked to Glacier Surge in Tajikstan’s Pamir Mountains

by | 12.6.2012 at 1:51pm
A view of Tajikstan's Pamir Mountains from air. (Irene2005)

Glaciers advance in colder temperatures, but sometimes a big rock avalanche can also make a glacier grow, new research results presented at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting suggests.

Frozen Water on Mercury, NASA Confirms

by | 11.29.2012 at 6:50pm
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Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, may hold at least 100 billion tons of ice in permanently shaded craters near its north pole, NASA scientists announced Thursday. The findings come as NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft nears its second year of orbit around Mercury. MESSENGER’s lead investigator, Sean Solomon, is director of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

After Sandy, Testing the Waters

by | 11.19.2012 at 11:32am | 3 Comments
Sandy Riverkeeper patrol 205

During Hurricane Sandy the seas rose a record 14-feet in lower Manhattan. Water flooded city streets, subways, tunnels and even sewage treatment plants. It is unclear how much sewage may have been released as plants lost power or were forced to divert untreated wastewater into the Hudson River. Four days after Sandy, the environmental group [...]

A Prescient Voice on Sandy: Suddenly Everyone Is Listening

by | 11.6.2012 at 10:45am | 1 Comment
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For much of the last decade, Klaus Jacob warned of New York’s vulnerability to severe flooding in a major storm. Four days after the storm that crippled New York and New Jersey and swamped his own home along the Hudson River, Jacob reflected on Sandy’s lessons and what comes next.