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 new study in Science finds that the oceans may be acidifying faster today from industrial emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years when carbon levels spiked naturally.
A well-traveled seismometer sits tucked inside a concrete chamber behind the Kent School chapel in Northwest Connecticut, recording earthquakes. It got here by chance.
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.
