Natural Disasters55
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The Science and the Lessons of Hurricane Sandy
Reports and studies have been imagining events like Sandy for years now; so why were so few people ready to listen? And will this lead to a serious conversation about climate change in the halls of power?
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Bharungamari – End of the Road
For our final installation, we had to go from the edge of the Bay of Bengal almost to Bangladesh’s northern border with India, a trip of over 350 miles. Along the way we stopped at Humayun’s childhood home, had several flats and picked up a student of Humayun’s from the town where we installed it.…
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Hiron Point in Sundarban
We traveled by boat to the south part of the Sundarbans near the Indian Ocean to install a GPS at Hiron Point, this isolated facility also hosts a tide gauge recording long-term water level changes due to rising sea level and land subsidence. Our GPS will help distinguish how much of each there is in…
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Polder 32
Polder 32 is one of the many inland islands in Bangladesh that was enclosed by an embankment to protect it from flooding. When that embankment failed during Cyclone Aila in 2009, the island was flooded for almost 2 years. Subsidence of the ground inside the embankment with no sedimentation to compensate made it worse. We…
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Khepupara to Kokilmoni
Leaving Dhaka, we spend an entire day getting to Khepupara in southern Bangladesh. Then we spent a long morning installing a GPS to monitor subsidence of the delta before heading back on the road again.
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To Comilla and Back
I’ve just arrived back in Bangladesh with an engineer to install 6 new GPS stations to add to our studies of earthquake hazards and land subsidence. Our first stop was Comilla University, the westernmost exposed fold of the collision between the Ganges-Bramaputra Delta and the Sumatra-Andaman-Burma plat boundary.
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Japan, Nuclear Power and the Need for Transparency
A year and a half after the Great East Japan Earthquake triggered one of the worst nuclear catastrophes in recorded history, the country is now in full energy conservation mode.
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Seeking the Deadly Roots of the Dinosaurs’ Ascent
Over the past 450 million years, life on earth has undergone at least five great extinctions, when biological activity nosedived and dominant groups of creatures disappeared. The final one (so far) was 65 million years ago, when it appears that a giant meteorite brought fires, shock waves and tsunamis, then drastically altered the climate. That killed off…
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Along an Ancient Coast, Clues to a Global Extinction
Wave-washed sea cliffs along the coasts of western England and Wales are home to spectacular assemblages of rocks and fossils that may hold keys to understanding a sudden global extinction 201.4 million years ago that cleared the way for the rapid evolution of dinosaurs. Paleontologist Paul Olsen and geologist Dennis Kent of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty…
You Asked invites you to share your most pressing questions about climate, science, and sustainability. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia Climate School experts will respond with clear, evidence-based answers. Pose your questions and story ideas!
