A 500-foot rock face came crashing down from the Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River in Alpine, N.J. on Saturday night, shaking the ground for more than half a minute and dumping a fresh layer of boulders over a 100-yard strip of parkland below State Line Lookout. The shaking was strong enough to be registered by a seismic station a mile and a half away, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, but no one was injured.
Sunday night after successfully recovering a gravity core about 42 miles north of the equator, conditions were right for a rare treat – the green flash.
by Kaci Fowler “Environmental politics is a part of who I am,” said Robert Eshelman, an aspiring journalist in Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Robert used an Earth Institute travel grant to learn and write about sustainability in his senior thesis. “I am telling stories that will have a true impact on the environment.” Robert [...]
Today I got another chance to go out with team CASIMBO to drill ice-cores. The weather was beautiful with no wind, a few clouds, bright sunshine and a balmy temperature of about 5 degrees F. When I first saw sea ice near Alert a few years ago, I was very surprised. It wasn’t anything like [...]
It’s a Saturday morning, and most kids between the ages of 12 and 14 are sleeping in, off to rehearsals or sports team practice, or grudgingly helping with household chores. At Columbia University, a group of middle-school students are eagerly engaging in the scientific method.
Yesterday we left our first study region with new samples from the seafloor and a healthy respect for the ocean currents that can erode sediment deep in the ocean. The seafloor we surveyed was heavily eroded and we had to look carefully before finding sites that were promising enough to try sampling. Even then we ran into difficulties getting the sediments back to the ship.
Evidence of the retreat of glaciers since the last glacial maximum (check), flying over sites of ancient Inuit, Norse and present day settlements (check), and a personal recollection of my own past in this location (check).
The weather started to get increasingly worse yesterday, with a lot of clouds, low visibility and snow. That, of course, means that we couldn’t go out flying for two days. The forecast for the next 24 hours doesn’t look promising either. But as usual in the Arctic it’s better not to forecast — everything might change within hours.
The 2012 field season started out better than we could hope for. The weather has been great for flying out onto the ice and sampling water from the Arctic ocean. We were able to get water samples from three stations, including one at the North Pole.
Earth Institute scientists explore how the physical world works on every continent — over and under the ice in the arctic, in the remotest regions of Antarctica, in the grasslands of Mongolia and forests of Eastern Turkey, from volcanoes in Patagonia and subduction zones in Papua New Guinea to the streets of New York City.
State of the Planet is a forum for discussion on varying viewpoints. The opinions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Earth Institute or Columbia University.
