Category: Earth Sciences

Rock Fall Shakes New Jersey Palisades

by Kim Martineau | 5.16.2012 at 12:25pm
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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.

A Rare Treat – The Green Flash

by Guest Blogger | 5.15.2012 at 4:00pm
MGL_1208_Green_Flash_Start

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.

Journalism Student Completes Thesis on Texas Drought and Wildfire

by Guest Blogger | 5.14.2012 at 1:56pm
Robert Eshelman

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 [...]

Ice cores…finally

by Ronny Friedrich | 5.11.2012 at 4:41pm
Ben taking an ice-core

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 [...]

Students. Saturday. Science?

by Tamara Plummer | 5.11.2012 at 12:08pm

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.

Drilling Ancient Mud from Seafloor No Easy Task

by Pratigya Polissar | 5.9.2012 at 11:01pm
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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.

Our Best Flight Yet

by Kirsty Tinto | 5.9.2012 at 5:07pm
Our last sunrise in Kangerlussuaq – we won’t be seeing  another of these, since now we have moved up to Thule and the sun won’t set again until we return to Wallops at the end of the season.

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).

Ice-Coring…Almost

by Ronny Friedrich | 5.8.2012 at 5:42pm
Getting ready to get ice-cores toegther with the team CASIMBO.

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.

Sampling Water at the North Pole

by Ronny Friedrich | 5.7.2012 at 5:18pm

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.

An Interactive Map of Scientific Fieldwork

by David Funkhouser | 5.7.2012 at 4:21pm
Field work guide map, Earth Institute, Lamont-Doherrt Earth Observatory

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.