A rainy, cold Saturday morning in October turned into a day filled with learning about our planet. I might have stayed home, gotten cozy and watched a movie with friends, but instead I headed to Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory for its annual Open House. (Lamont is part of the Columbia Climate School.) So far, it’s probably the most fun event I have attended this semester — partly because I got to play with some sticky cornstarch slime just like a little kid.
Speaking of kids, Open House was full of them. Hundreds of attendees, including smiling families bundled up in jackets and scarves, came to learn more about Earth science from scientists who specialize in everything from marine geophysics to seismology to dendrochronology (the study of tree rings). Lamont was founded in 1949 and is home to more than 500 scientists, students and staff.
Just a 30-minute drive from NYC, across the Hudson River, Palisades could not be more beautiful. The leaves were changing colors, with hues of orange and green everywhere I looked.
Walking into the observatory’s campus, on the way to the lecture halls, we walked through 175 years of climate history along a colored path. Titled “Walk Through Our Climate,” the art, which was painted directly on the asphalt, visually represented climate change: blue was cooler, and red was warmer. The stripe representing the present climate was almost as dark as the asphalt.
The day started with a lecture by geophysicist Göran Ekström. Every seat in the large lecture hall was taken. I sat in the first row, with a family behind me chattering about how excited they were to be in a classroom again.
Ekström’s hour-long talk focused on what caused the August 2026 landslide and flood along the Nepal-China border that left more than 1,300 people dead and 5,000 missing.
“Thousands of lives were lost in this catastrophe, and most of those lives taken were in Nepal,” Ekström said. “Some of these people had warning, but most of them did not.”
A sliver of Langtang Lirung—a peak more than 7,000 meters tall right by the border—detached and fell into a glacial valley, creating a rock and ice avalanche moving at 100 kilometers per hour, Ekström said. The avalanche caused the river at the bottom of the valley to flood, triggering the disaster.
Ekström’s analysis showed that the landslide had a magnitude of 5.7, the “biggest landslide in the area in over 20 years of monitoring.” The seismogram analysis indicated that 300 million to 500 million tons of material fell, approximately the weight of “every single passenger car in the United States.”
Flooding events are not unusual in that mountainous area. Several have occurred in the past decade, he said. The ultimate cause of the landslide, though, is plate tectonics and mountain growth. In the big scheme of things, the Indian tectonic plate is moving northward at almost 5 centimeters per year and pushing into the Eurasian plate, he said, a collision that pushes mountains up and forward. Though Mount Everest and the rest of the Himalayas are estimated to grow 4 millimeters per year, their rock breaks down because of erosion, which also brings mountains down—as we saw in this example.
“Some of these rivers [in Nepal] have flood gauges, but this flooding was so massive that the flood gauge was knocked out,” Ekström said. “But warning systems have been installed and we will continue developing better techniques that can withstand this type of impact.”
After the lecture, I strolled past some research exhibits about animals in the Hudson River and seals in Antarctica, and heard cheers and laughter. And it was coming from a crowd gathered around a bathtub.
Kids and parents gathered around geophysicist Marc Spiegelman, who was dancing on top of what you normally see only in a bathroom. The bathtub was filled with water and cornstarch, a mixture commonly known as oobleck. Oobleck acts like a liquid when touched gently and slowly, but hardens into a solid state when squeezed or punched.
Spiegelman’s feet somehow didn’t sink below the surface when he stomped quickly on the mixture, but that was the whole point: “As long as you keep moving, you stay on top of things, but if you stop, you’re buried,” he said.
Spiegelman was demonstrating some properties of rheology, or the study of how materials behave when put under stress, he said.
“It’s about the rate at which you try to drive matter,” he added. “If it’s fast, the particles can lock against each other, but when you slow down, space opens.”
As soon as he stopped his show—which garnered many laughs from the kids—his feet sank. Removing his legs from what seemed like quicksand was quite difficult. It was almost painful to see him struggle for a few minutes, but witnessing his phone accidentally sink into the bathtub was even worse. The kids ran around trying to find paper towels to help him get the sticky stuff off his screen.
At a tent a few exhibits away, Einat Lev, a professor of seismology, geodynamics and tectonics, presented an exhibit that featured a short film about recent volcanic eruptions on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, which she both recorded and narrated.
Lev said she and her team at Lamont witnessed the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano firsthand in 2021. The eruption lasted six months.
Historically, Iceland has always been volcanically active, she said, but nobody knew exactly when this one would erupt, even though there were earthquakes below the surface. Since then, eruptions have happened about once a year, she said.
“The flow [of lava] was unbelievable, and we were able to get really close while still being safe,” she said. “The first one was exciting, but the second one a year later became threatening.”
Iceland’s government has been building protective barriers made of rocks and dirt to prevent damage to critical facilities like power plants and homes.
In the Arctic, many natural materials can “tell time,” acting like geologic clocks. That’s what marine geologist Angela Slagle’s exhibit was about at another tent.
Slagle focuses on seafloor drilling and explained to the attendees why it’s important to use the seafloor to tell time.
“The deeper you go into the seafloor, the farther back in time you go,” Slagle said. “Sediments can tell us how far a glacier went, when it retreated, or where and when it stopped.”
Slagle’s exhibit was my personal favorite. You could hear the passion in her voice as attendees approached her to learn more.
As Slagle pointed to a huge map under our feet with more than 400 green dots—each representing a drill program team from the Scientific Ocean Drilling Coordination Office—she showed us where seabed sediments had been extracted. These sediments help tell “stories about how the Earth formed” and about the “Blast Zone”—where an asteroid struck Earth and contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs millions of years ago near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Slagle also told stories about the formation of the Hudson River, based on sediments studied by scientists at Lamont. Nearly 20,000 years ago, the river and much of New York were covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which spanned millions of square miles.
As a journalism student in my first and only year at Columbia, I wish I’d learned about the Open House and Lamont scientists’ work earlier. These professors and researchers stunned me with how clearly and simply science can be communicated.
I texted my mom about how much I learned that day.
Alexia Massoud is a climate and science journalism student at the Columbia Journalism School. She previously covered environmental politics in Brazil.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
