News
The days have been so long and jam-packed days that none of us can believe it’s only been two full days here. The wells and preparations have taken longer than expected, but we are finally seeing progress.
After 11 hours on the road, we finally reached Jamalganj and the drill site. Unable to face the long daily drive to our planned rest house, we arranged to stay locally.
Northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut and environs are not necessarily where one would expect to explore the onetime extinction of much life on earth, and subsequent rise of dinosaurs. But it turns out to be a pretty good place to start. Underlying the exurbs are geological formations left by three giant episodes of volcanism starting around 200 million years ago, and… read more
The Feb. 12 Saturday Night Live had a skit called “A Spot of Tea,” in which three very proper English ladies spill boiling water on their laps and lose a massive shelf of glass knickknacks during a series of giant earthquakes. Behind them is a seismograph registering the chaos—a portable MEQ-800 model, supplied by Lamont-Doherty Earth… read more
Kathy Licht, an “old hat” of Antarctic field research and part of the Antarctica's Secrets team, shares her impressions how it feels to be back on the ice.
Having picked up their extreme weather gear in New Zealand, our Antarctica's Secrets team lands on Antarctica and settles in McMurdo station where they will be trained and prepared for their camping trip to the Transantarctic mountains.
After months of waiting, our Antarctica's Secrets team leaves Los Angeles on a non stop 12 hour flight to New Zealand. Their first stop is Christchurch, New Zealand, where they pick up their extreme weather clothing for the trip to Antarctica.
Understanding the historical context and dynamics of Antarctica’s massive ice sheets is critical for modeling future changes that have the potential to impact the globe, including significant contributions to sea level rise.
If climate change proceeds apace, summer sea ice in the Arctic is projected to nearly disappear by the end of this century. But a group of researchers predicts that ice will continue to collect in one small area, perhaps providing a last-ditch stand for ringed seals, polar bears and other creatures that cannot live without… read more
David Walker, a professor of geochemistry at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, will be honored tonight by colleagues at the American Geophysical Union for decades of groundbreaking work to understand the early formation of the moon and Earth. Walker will receive the AGU’s Harry H. Hess Medal, awarded for “outstanding achievements in research of the constitution and evolution of Earth and… read more
All day long a flood of thousands scientists and students ebbs and flows across San Francisco’s 4th Street and Howard Avenue, coursing between the cavernous Moscone West and Moscone South convention buildings. The AGU is like a supercomputer of earth science, with human currents of data swapping information, heading from one talk to another, processing… read more
Like dirt swept under the carpet, it appears that much of the human-made heat produced over the last century has been getting soaked up by the world’s oceans, and sinking into deep waters.
At AGU, you need the right tools to understand what’s going on, and to get where you need to go. Columbia researchers have been looking for the right tools to navigate another complicated place: The gap between what climate science tells us, and how a lot of the public hears that information.
Charts, graphs and maps representing natural phenomena can be a challenge to anyone trying to extract something meaningful from them. A new book, Earth Science Puzzles: Making Meaning From Data, aims to help students of earth and environmental sciences decode images by presenting practice puzzles consisting of real-world scientific data. The authors are Kim A. Kastens and Margie Turrin of… read more
Kirsty Tinto joins Operation IceBridge on two flights over the Amundsen Sea and past Thwaites Glacier to survey the Getz and the Dotson ice shelves.