News

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.

Operation IceBridge Antarctica ramps up for a second year of ice surveys. Originating from Chile, a series of airborne missions will be flown almost daily from the airbase in Punta Arenas.

Earth Institute scientists have begun research into the Gulf oil spill’s physical and ecological impacts, both on land at sea. While much attention has focused on surface oil washing up along the shores of Gulf coast states, one cruise starting in mid-August will study the location and magnitude of subsurface oil plumes, and their effects… read more

A final note (for now) on the expedition to recover ice cores from the top of Puncak Jaya in Papua, Indonesia: the cores arrived safely on Thursday, July 22, at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, and are now in a special freezer. In coming months, the team hopes to extract and interpret climatic… read more

I have reached Jakarta, and so have the ice cores, which are being kept frozen while awaiting air shipment to the United States. The rest of the team has already returned to their homes. Next for me: back to sea level, on two research cruises that will add oceanographic information to the data we gathered on Puncak Jaya…. read more

Nano and I took the train to Rome to meet a colleague for lunch, and after we explored the old city. I have been through Rome a number of times, making my way to and from Calabria, but this was my first time really seeing the city. Nano was a fantastic tour guide. He was… read more

This spectacular video takes you above Puncak Jaya and vicinity via helicopter, and into the ice camp. Created by videographers David Christenson, Greg Chmura and Ario Samudro, it was forwarded  by Scott Hanna of the Freeport McMoRan mning company, which provided heavy logistical support for the ice-coring mission (including the helicopter itself). Click here to view the video.