Posts
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Preparing for Chimborazo
I am staying with a friend’s family in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, and tomorrow will meet up with my climbing partner, Pablo Puruncajas, to prepare for our expedition. I am here to collect tree ring samples and put up a weather station on Chimborazo, Ecuador’s tallest peak, to provide climate data about this region, which…
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The Missing Piece in Sustainable Peace
We know very little about what “peace” is (and what it isn’t), the conditions that promote it, the motives that drive people to work for it, how to measure it, and how to build a climate and infrastructure that sustains it. Why? Because we don’t study peace. We study war, violence, aggression and conflict—and peace…
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Resilience and Flood Risk
As New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged last Tuesday, “We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns; we have an old infrastructure, we have old systems. That is not a good combination.” This is exactly why the flood insurance market, as a tool for change, is of interest to the mayor’s…
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‘This is a wake-up call – don’t hit the snooze button’
For years before Hurricane Sandy charged ashore on Monday, researchers from the Earth Institute knew what was coming. As the region struggles to recover from this “superstorm,” we asked some of them to consider the lessons we can learn as we move forward.
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A Prescient Voice on Sandy: Suddenly Everyone Is Listening
For much of the last decade, Klaus Jacob warned of New York’s vulnerability to severe flooding in a major storm. Four days after the storm that crippled New York and New Jersey and swamped his own home along the Hudson River, Jacob reflected on Sandy’s lessons and what comes next.
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Why U.S. Politics are Stuck – and a Possible Way Out
In this recent TEDx talk in Miami, Professor Peter T. Coleman, chair of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) at The Earth Institute, explains why politics in the United States are more deadlocked and polarized today than they have been since the end of the U.S. Civil War, and what our next…
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The Zen of Sanding
By Ana Camila Gonzalez “But can’t you see the rings already?” I ask, wondering why I’ve been asked to sand a sample- it sounds to me like one would damage a sample by subjecting it to the mechanical screech of a sander. “Yes, but under the microscope they look foggy if you don’t sand…
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MCI’s Signature S2S Program Kicks Off its Third Year with a Series of Trainings
MCI’s signature School2School Connectivity Project (S2S), a partnership with global communications giants Ericsson and Airtel Ghana, the City of Kumasi, Ghana, the Kumasi Metropolitan Education Directorate, Columbia University Teachers College and selected New York City public and private schools to teach the uses of the computer and the Internet in the teaching of the STEM…
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The ‘Skinny’ on Antarctic Sea Ice
One piece of our IceBridge mission focuses on sea ice here in the south. Sea ice in the northern regions has been reducing at dramatic rates over the last decade, setting a new record just this year, but the story in the south is not so clear. In fact, there has been a buzz that…
