Author: Kim Martineau9
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Sewage Still Plagues Hudson River
People are swimming in the Hudson again, and while clumps of sewage rarely float by anymore, the water is not reliably clean, says a report released this week from the environmental group Riverkeeper. Four years of testing by Riverkeeper and Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, show recurring hot spots, especially after rain, when overwhelmed sewers divert…
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Hands-on Earth Science Book Wins Education Award
A new book of puzzles on earthquakes, weather, climate and hydrothermal vents has been recognized for distinguished achievement by the Association of Educational Publishers. Using real-world scientific data, Earth Science Puzzles lets students practice key earth science skills and concepts such as locating an earthquake or figuring out what controls the amount of water flowing…
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Making Peace: New Book Provides Tools for Solving Intractable Conflicts
Five percent of all difficult conflicts end in a destructive quagmire. Think of the current debate over global warming or the Israel-Palestine conflict. How can we overcome these? An Earth Institute psychologist, Peter T. Coleman, offers tactics in his new book, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts. Coleman, who also heads Columbia’s…
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Can Big Earthquakes Disrupt World Weather?
The recent earthquake in Japan shifted the earth’s axis by half a foot. You may be wondering if that’s enough to change earth’s weather. No, not really, says Jerry McManus, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Earthquakes unleash a tremendous amount of energy, but not enough to upset the energy balance of earth’s…
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Test Your Energy-Saving Savvy
What hogs more energy? A desktop computer or a laptop? Central air conditioning or an A/C unit? Take Slate’s energy quiz and find out. The magazine collaborated with researchers at Columbia’s Earth Institute to come up with questions to test if readers know how much energy their household appliances are guzzling. The quiz was adapted…
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Insuring the World’s Poorest Farmers
Index insurance could help small-scale farmers build wealth and cope with climate change, but more accurate weather and climate data is needed for index insurance to catch on, writes Daniel Osgood, a scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). In a new piece in Nature Geoscience, Osgood and colleagues outline…
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Improving Climate Prediction in Africa
Africa lags the developed world in weather stations but still produces a surprising amount of data. Too bad few people are using it. Scientists at Columbia University and a growing number of others—among them Bill Gates and the charity arm of Google—are pushing to open Africa’s climate archive to the world by making it free.…
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Snake Expert and Former Earth Institute Fellow Named a National Geographic “Emerging Explorer”
Snake venom can kill, but it might also save your life. Zoltan Takacs has co-invented a technology for building “toxin libraries” that might one day lead to drugs that can treat cancer, multiple sclerosis and a variety of other diseases. His quest for venomous creatures has taken him to 133 countries, across jungles, deserts and…
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Taro Takahashi Wins Top U.N. Award for Environmental Leadership
The United Nations has awarded Taro Takahashi, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, its highest honor for environmental leadership, the Champions of the Earth award, for his research on the oceans’ uptake of carbon dioxide and its implications for global warming. He was presented with a trophy and a $40,000 prize on Thursday, April 22,…
