Earth Sciences118
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Dealing with Mother Nature
Working in the poles we are constantly reminded of our dependence on meteorology, and this project has dealt us a variety of different weather considerations. The most obvious is the weather we experience at the base. Storm season in Thule lasts from the 15th of September to the 14th of May; in other words encompassing…
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Switchyard Project: Sampling Success
The past 1½ weeks have been very successful. Our team from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was able to obtain water samples from eight stations, while the team from the University of Washington has already broken their all-time record of the past years of 18 stations. Today (May 7) is actually the first day we can’t fly…
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Switchyard Project: Rescue Operation
Four people who tried to ski from the North Pole to Greenland got stuck on the ice and ran out of food. Since our team was out on the ice for sampling close to their location, we stopped sampling and picked them up.
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Switchyard Project: It’s all about the weather
One can only imagine what kind of a pilot one has to be to fly in the arctic regions and land on sea-ice under weather conditions as we have experienced already – fog above the ice and clouds covering the area with very low visibility.
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Petermann Glacier: At a glacial pace?
We are beginning our focus on the land based ice of northern Greenland. Flying out of Thule places us close to Petermann Glacier situated in Greenland’s northwest corner. The focus of our first flight of this phase of the project (the overall 29th flight of the season!) is Petermann Glacier. Perhaps Greenland’s most newsworthy glacier…
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Climate News Roundup: Week of 4/24
Carbon emissions ‘hidden’ in imported goods revealed, BBC, Apr. 25 Two recent studies present that the amount of carbon dioxide emissions “hidden” in imported goods is increasing. These emissions are not currently included in national estimates. “There is a degree of delusion about emissions cuts in developed nations. They are not really cuts at all…
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Switchyard Project: Day 1 – Alert, Alert, Alert
The first day of our operation is usually filled with a lot of work preparing and testing the instruments we brought up here, preparing the airplanes, loading our equipment into the planes, setting up the equipment in the laboratory and preparing the sampling containers. Since our operation requires drilling holes through the sea ice, we…
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Keeping America Competitive by Sparking Curiosity in the Classroom
To keep America competitive in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (the STEM disciplines), a report from the National Academy of Sciences calls for strengthening the skills of some 250,000 teachers across the United States through university-run science training programs. The report asserts that when teachers gain laboratory experience and conduct fieldwork alongside active researchers, they…
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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…