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.
Twice humans have witnessed the wasting of snow and ice from Peru’s tallest volcano, Nevado Coropuna—In the waning of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, and today, as industrial carbon dioxide in the air raises temperatures again. As in the past, Coropuna’s retreating glaciers figure prominently in the lives of people below. In an ongoing project, scientists at Columba University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and partner institutions are reconstructing the ebb and flow of ice on Coropuna since the last ice age to understand how the tropics influence the global climate system, how ice-loss and a warmer climate will impact farming in the region, and what adaptation measures might help people survive in this hotter, drier world.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems, Water
Tags> Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Lamont-Doherty scientist Hugh Ducklow is featured in a documentary due out next summer on climate change and the West Antarctic Peninsula. Catch a preview in this newly-released trailer.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems, Water
Tags> Antarctica, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
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.
Category> Earth Sciences
Tags> Big Data
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.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences, General Earth Institute
Tags> Climate
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.
Category> Earth Sciences, General Earth Institute, Natural Disasters
Tags> landslides, seismology
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.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences
Tags> Global Warming, polar amplification
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.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems, Urbanization, Water
Tags> Global Warming, U.S. Southwest
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.
Category> Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecosystems, General Earth Institute, Water
Tags> American Geophysical Union, american geophysical union 2012
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.
Category> Earth Sciences, General Earth Institute
Tags> American Geophysical Union, american geophysical union 2012
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.
Category> Earth Sciences, General Earth Institute, Water
Tags> Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Mercury, NASA
