Near the end of “Chasing Ice,” a hunk of glacier the size of lower Manhattan explodes, rolls and crashes into the sea. If that sounds like a spoiler, well, go see the movie and you’ll know you would have known it was coming anyway. And the beauty of the movie is that it will still astound you.
The fourth seminar in the Earth Institute’s Sustainable Development Seminar Series, “Ch Ch Ch Changes – recent trends in temperature extremes and hydroclimate,” brought together experts in the fields of climate change and hydrology to discuss emerging trends in global weather events.
A new two-year climate change initiative, led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society aims to help farmers in Indonesia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Bangladesh reduce their vulnerability to climate risks.
Dr. Wade McGillis of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory is the Lead Principal Investigator on a new project entitled “NYC Sustainable Urban Water Quality: the Earthwatch Institute Freshwater Program”, set to take place through January 2017. Dr. McGillis and his staff will be working in partnership with the Earth Watch Institute to deliver this [...]
Earth Institute research expeditions investigating the dynamics of the planet on all levels take place on every continent and every ocean. Most projects originate with our main research center, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and are often run in collaboration with other institutions.
Extreme weather and climate-related events already have cost the United States billions of dollars. A recent symposium focused on what we know about the causes and how changing climate affects agriculture, water supplies, wildlife and our economy.
Rosario Costa-Cabral and her brothers harvest hundreds of fruits, oils and wood products from the stream-laced forest of the Amazon River delta. But the climate here is changing: Tides rise higher, and seasonal floods are growing worse.
Sandy instantly brought a new kind of national media attention to the influence of global warming on weather disasters. After several years of near-silence on climate from our political leaders and the mainstream media, the renewed attention is profoundly welcome.
One piece of our IceBridge mission focuses on sea ice here in the south. Sea ice in the northern regions has been reducing at dramatic rates over the last decade, setting a new record just this year, but the story in the south is not so clear. In fact, there has been a buzz that [...]
If you wanted to get a sense of the State of the Planet, you didn’t need to be at the Columbia University conference on Oct. 11. You just needed to follow #SOP2012. Six hundred people gathered at the event to think about the future of sustainable development, while 476 people sent 1,300 tweets, making about 6.2 million impressions through Twitter. And one thread running through the event was that social media is an important way to draw attention to sustainable development issues on an international platform and in a comprehensible way.
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.
