Posted by Urban Design Lab | Oct 13, 2009 |
In public debate about the future of America’s energy policy, the Northeast region is in contention regarding gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale field. With this project, we focused on the Marcellus Shale gas extraction along the Upper Delaware, in the Town of Hancock. The process of extraction includes potential environmental hazards and while contentious, is devoid of local oversight. To date, just in Hancock, more than twenty-five percent of the town’s land has been leased for gas drilling.
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Posted by Editor | Oct 12, 2009 |
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:
The flight engineer ticks off instruments over the intercom. “LVIS, ready.” “Gravity, ready.” “DACOM, ready.”
We are about to take the DC-8 on its first test flight before Antarctica. The pilots, clipped and professional, have just described the day’s flight plans and the plane is bustling with people making [...]
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Posted by Kim Martineau | Oct 9, 2009 |
Before airplanes and satellite phones, polar exploration was a more dangerous undertaking than it is now. Many who set out for the frozen ends of the earth did not come back. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and British explorer Ernest Shackleton were some of the few who brought their entire crews home safely.
Nansen began his expedition [...]
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Posted by Editor | Sep 30, 2009 |
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:
I’m a senior engineer at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and my role in Operation Ice Bridge is to work with the gravimeter. This instrument can see beneath ice sheets into the water and bedrock below to reveal the ice sheet’s hidden contours – critical information for [...]
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Posted by Editor | Sep 29, 2009 |
Michael Studinger, Instrument Co-Principal Investigator, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:
The scale and style of Operation Ice Bridge will be a new experience for me. I’ve been involved in airborne research for more than a decade using ice-penetrating radar systems, airborne laser scanning, gravity and magnetics to learn more about the polar ice caps and how they behave.
In [...]
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Posted by Kim Martineau | Sep 15, 2009 |
Bärbel Hönisch, an expert on ocean acidification at Columbia, will speak after a screening of the film “A Sea Change” this Thursday.
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Posted by Kevin Krajick | Sep 15, 2009 |
That rumbling you feel is not necessarily a passing subway. New York City and the surrounding region gets a surprising number of small earthquakes, and a 2008 study from the region’s network of seismographs, run by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, suggests that the risk of a damaging one is not negligible. This week, the federal government announced a major upgrade [...]
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Posted by Kyu Lee | Sep 14, 2009 |
Tomorrow, Sept. 14 at 10am (EST), Jeff Sachs is participating in a webcast on “Globalization in the Era of Environmental Crisis.” The discussion is part of the Raul Prebisch lecture series and organized by the UN Commission on Trade and Development. Should be very interesting considering the current financial crisis and as a run-up to [...]
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Posted by Urban Design Lab | Sep 11, 2009 |
Contributed by Richard Plunz and Michael Conard
On September 10th, Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” highlighted the work of designers at the Earth Institute’s Urban Design Lab (UDL) in his Op-Ed Contribution to the New York Times, titled “Big Food vs. Big Insurance.” Since 2007, researchers at the UDL, [...]
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Posted by Steve Cohen | Sep 3, 2009 |
On August 27th, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced that his office will provide $1.8 million of a $7 million settlement with a number of towns in Westchester that had been illegally dumping raw sewage into the Bronx River.
According to Cuomo’s web site:
“The funding will be provided to seven entities, including the Bronx [...]
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