Photo Essay: A Day in the Life of the Hudson River

Wading into the Hudson, the students collect, identify and count species of fish. Here, Pearl River High School teacher Tom Mullane holds up a juvenile herring. (Margie Turrin)

At the end of Piermont Pier students collect water depths throughout the day to see how tidal cycles affect their other measurements.

Lamont postdoctoral researcher Bess Koffman points to the line of debris left by the river’s most recent high tide.

Using the day’s high tide as a reference, the students measure how much farther inland the river will come by 2100 under several scenarios for future carbon dioxide emissions and rising sea level.

Fresh mud cored from the Hudson River provides a record of environmental change. How wet was climate in the past? How dry? Visiting scientist Maara Packalen leads the discussion. (Margie Turrin)

After coring a tube of sediments the students write a description of the sample as Lamont geophysicist Angela Slagle reads out the time.

When the coring work is done, Lamont climate scientist Dorothy Peteet returns the sediments to the river.

Lamont postdoctoral researcher Liz Corbett passes along a refractometer, a telescope-like instrument that measures water salinity.

Water chemistry measurements are logged into a chart, reviewed here by two students.

Lamont graduate student Frank Pavia helps students interpret water chemistry data.

A mechanical pump pulls plankton from the river. At the close of “A Day in the Life of the Hudson River,” Lamont’s Margie Turrin and Rich Iannuzzi pack the pump away until next year.

Once a year, Piermont Pier becomes a field station, and local students, a team of environmental investigators. On Tuesday, scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led students through a series of field experiments designed to teach them more about the Hudson River. The students took water chemistry measurements and compared them to the Hudson’s tidal cycles. They cored sediments from the river bottom and pictured their stretch of the Hudson covered in glaciers. They mapped out how high the river may rise under several CO2-emissions scenarios.

Their investigations led to many questions by the end of the day.

“How can we slow down sea level rise?”
“Can we see extinction events in sediment cores?”
“Does plankton abundance vary with water temperature?”

Now in its 12th year, the event, called “A Day in the Life of the Hudson River,” was organized by the New York’s State Department of Environmental Conservation. All photos by Kim Martineau unless otherwise credited.