News

I’m writing from where L’Atalante is currently parked, 18S 170W, right in the middle of a giant, anomalously high sea surface chlorophyll patch. Such a high concentration of chlorophyll—a pigment that helps photosynthetic organisms harvest energy from sunlight, and the one that’s responsible for the green color of plants—can mean but one thing in the ocean: a phytoplankton bloom.

With the roads in Bangladesh hazardous to drive because of the ongoing political unrest, our undergraduate sustainable development class managed to proceed with our class trip over Spring Break by doing all travel by boat.

On every continent and ocean, Earth Institute field researchers study the dynamics of climate, geology, ecology, human history and more. Here is a list of expeditions going on this year, and beyond.

I’ve never been good at navigating. When I come out of the subway I invariably turn the wrong direction, even though I already have my nose buried in Google Maps, and then walk around the block to save face.

Greetings from the center of that eddy I mentioned in my last post! We’ve been here for five days so far, but tomorrow we are finally moving on.

We have completed the first two stations of the OUTPACE cruise and we are steaming to Station 3. By noon tomorrow we should be in the center of an eddy that our colleagues back on dry land have used satellite data to identify.

A Toronto-based company has been convicted of selling illegal ivory in the first case to use a technique for dating ivory developed by a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The OUTPACE 2015 cruise has set sail on February 20! We left port in Nouméa at 8:30 a.m. last Friday morning. I lost sight of land around 10 a.m. or so, and I won’t see it again until we return to port in Papeete, Tahiti on April 3.

Scientists Link Warming Trend to Record Drought and Later Unrest

This week marks the launch of the new Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between a variety of centers, research groups and individuals from across Columbia University. The Initiative, led by Adam Sobel, kicked off on Monday evening with a World Leaders Forum panel event in Low Library. Panelists discussed a wide range of science and policy topics related to extreme weather, showing the interdisciplinary nature of the new Initiative.

The Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate brings together experts across the university to integrate research into the physical science of these events with research on their impacts on human society and engineering solutions. The initiative kicks off this evening with a panel discussion, “Preparing for Extreme Weather: Global Lessons from Sandy,” from 6-7:30 p.m. Watch the live webcast.

Scientists from research institutions around the world are participating in a research expedition aboard the R/V L ‘Atalante to study how microorganisms in the South Pacific Ocean influence the carbon cycle. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory graduate student Kyle Frischkorn is among them; this is the first in a series of posts in which Kyle shares what it’s like to do research at sea.