Climate269
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Ready to Sail
Today we arrived at McMurdo, an American research station that hosts Antarctica’s largest community—about 1,000 people during austral summer. To get here, a US Air Force cargo plane picked us up in Christchurch, New Zealand, and landed us on the ice nearby. Today is a balmy summer day of 30°F, not much colder than the…
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Melting Glaciers–Tracking Their Path
I am a geophysicist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and I study how different processes shape the bottom of oceans and rivers. One focus of my research is the continental shelves off Antarctica, especially in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Sea, and the role of ice sheets in their formation. I made my first trip to…
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What’s Making West Antarctica Melt?
The view from the Palmer is so blindingly white today that the eye cannot tell where the ice ends and the clouds begin. In this unusually icy Antarctic summer, it seems strange to contemplate melting ice. But glaciers, here and in Greenland, are melting faster than they are growing. We know that ice sheets have…
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Climate News Roundup – Week of 2/1
Obama Seeks to Boost Nuclear Power in New Budget, Yahoo News A White House Official states Friday that President Obama plans to triple government loan guarantees for nuclear power development to over $54 billion. This increase follows President Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night, which urged legislators to reach a bi-partisan consensus…
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Food Miles, Fair Miles
It’s not often that when we purchase food from a bodega or grocery store that we consider where it came from. Is my apple from New York, Washington, or China? Were my tomatoes grown in Florida, California, or Mexico? Whose hands planted and picked them? Why did this planter choose this variety? Wherever our food…
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Is there hope from Copenhagen?
Can we find positives from the United Nations Summit on climate change? Even President Obama admits that disappointment is justified, although the Commander in Chief claims a non-binding accord was better than a complete collapse of the negotiations. Jeffrey Sachs, fearless leader of the Earth Institute, adamantly opposed such victory proclamation from the President, for…
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Global Environment Index Downgrades U.S. and China
Richer Countries Tend to Do Better—But Not Always
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Tundra, Microbes and World Climate
O. Roger Anderson is a microbiologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies bacteria, amoebas, fungi and other microorganisms. Lately he has been thinking about how tiny organisms that inhabit the vast northern tundra regions could contribute to changing climate, since, like humans, they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Recently, Anderson found a…
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The State of the Arctic
Where climate change is concerned, the Arctic region acts as a harbinger: the extremely sensitive Arctic system reacts earlier and more profoundly to anthropogenic climate change than many other regions. And as climate change progresses, it is also projected to experience greater environmental changes than other places on earth. As such, it has become an…
