Earth Sciences70
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It’s as Clear as Mud
For the sampling GEOTRACES is doing in the Arctic there is a specific goal of collecting just the top few dozen centimeters of sediment and the water just above it. Although the plan was good, things don’t always go perfectly.
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Scouring Arctic for Traces of Fukushima and Cosmic Rays
Sounds like the basis for a great scifi thriller…”scientists scour Arctic, hunting for traces of nuclear fallout and ejections from cosmic ray impacts”. In reality this thriller theme is the actual core of the GEOTRACES mission.
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Moving into the Realm of the Polar Bear
When we venture into the Arctic for research for most of us there is the lingering hope that a polar bear will appear on our watch; at least as long as we are safely outside of its reach.
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Photo Essay: The Mystery of North American Diamonds
People have been finding loose diamonds across the United States and Canada since the early 1800s, but for the most part, no one knows where they came from. It was not until the 1990s that geologists tracked down the first commercial deposits, on the remote tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Yaakov Weiss, a geochemist at…
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Cracking Open Diamonds for Messages From the Deep Earth
“After a diamond captures something, from that moment until millions of years later in my lab, that material stays the same. We can look at diamonds as time capsules, as messengers from a place we have no other way of seeing.”
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Mapping Land Claimed by Sea Level Rise
Understanding how coastal areas changed as the ocean rose in the past could help communities protect themselves from storm surge flooding in the future as the oceans warm and sea levels rise.
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Tracing the Arctic
The land surrounding the Arctic Ocean is like a set of cradling arms, holding the ocean and the sea ice in a circular grasp. Within that cradle is a unique mix of waters, including freshwater from melting glacial ice and large rivers, and a salty mix of relatively warm Atlantic water and the cooler Pacific…
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The Downs and Ups of Mountain Building
In the islands off Papua New Guinea, the rocks are giving rise to new ideas about the ways mountain chains form. A new scientific model shows how two seemingly opposite processes can take place in the same region.
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Teen Scientists Team Up with Lamont to Restore an Invaded Marsh
“My experience at Lamont has been great and it’s something like no other. Here I was basically being trained to be like a scientist with exposure to lab work, fieldwork and presentation skills.”

By studying thousands of buildings and analyzing their electricity use, Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson has been able to uncover ways to significantly cut energy consumption and emissions. Watch the Video: “Engineering a Cooler Future Through Smarter Buildings“
