
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…

“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.”

Annual tree rings are a rare find in the tropical islands of the eastern Pacific. The new discovery of trees with annual rings on a Hawaiian volcano could provide new climate data from a part of the world where much of the variability of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation originates.

The U.S. Gulf Coast has already felt the lasting effects of extreme weather on public health and infrastructure, and a new study says things could get worse with climate change.

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a joint center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute, is seeking an administrative assistant intern for Fall 2015.

“It took taking the Intro to Sustainable Development class for me to understand that this major is not only immediately applicable and vitally important, but also varied and interesting enough to keep me engaged throughout my college experience. Put simply, I discovered the passion that I hadn’t realized was there all along.”
Scientists Say Increasing Heat Drives Moisture from Ground

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.

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…