Month: January 20103
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Adelie penguins
The nice folks up on the bridge always give us a call when they see wildlife. Then we all grab our cameras and rush out to our favorite spots to try and photograph whatever creatures have come to visit. I’m no biologist, but seeing so many beautiful animals has made me curious. So I’ve been…
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Making Connections: Schools Come Together Thanks to Exciting New Partnership
I am in Kumasi, Ghana, for the launch of a great partnership between Ericsson, the mobile phone giant; Zain, the 3-G broadband giant; the City of Kumasi; 18 Kumasi public schools; and the Millennium Cities Initiative. Ericsson and Zain are connecting these 18 schools to the Internet, the Mayor of Kumasi is donating computer labs…
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The Haiti Earthquake
The quake in Haiti came suddenly—but the results were predictable. At the moment it struck, scientists from the Earth Institute and other parts of Columbia University were in Port-au-Prince with a UN-sponsored project assessing how to reduce the nation’s obvious vulnerability to natural disasters. It is clear that the extreme toll came as much from poverty…
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Reactions to Haiti Earthquake
Scientists from Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have provided some photographs and commented analysis of the earthquake in Haiti.
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Girls on Ice
While I’ve been staying on the ship, Erin Pettit has been flying off by helicopter to study glaciers. She has a really cool job, and I wish she would take me with her on some of her adventures. But it turns out that she wants to take you! Erin runs a program called Girls on…
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A Change in Plans
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton wrote “Pack-ice might be described as a gigantic and interminable jigsaw-puzzle devised by nature.” Shackleton was a great Antarctic explorer. He wanted to be the first to cross the continent of Antarctica, but his expedition ran into unexpectedly icy conditions. He is famous now, not for achieving his goal, but for…
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Do I Want It in My Backyard? Yes I Do!
Coining a new phrase is a great way to change an old attitude, was my initial thought when I first read about “YIMFY” or “yes in my front yard”, a phrase introduced in a report from the International Energy Agency.It is a play on the well-known negative “not in my back yard”, but in reverse…
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Scientists on Ice
I don’t want to give you the idea that science is all fun and games. We work hard! But I have to admit that today has been pretty spectacular. The morning was spent watching the helicopters take off and land for an ice reconnaissance mission. Since the ship is fully iced in, we got to…
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Hola, Amigos!
People are very friendly at sea. Still, Ted Scambos spends an awful lot of time talking about his amigos. But it turns out that these are no ordinary friends – they’re Automated Meteorology-Ice-Geophysics Observing Stations. The area that we’ll be visiting used to be a huge ice shelf, called Larsen B. It collapsed 2002, losing…
