
It’s said that practice makes perfect, and that saying couldn’t be truer than for health care workers trying to save newborn lives in low-income settings. Without frequent retraining and refresher workshops, such skills deteriorate over time. The need for these workshops is especially strong in Ethiopia, where the infant mortality rate is 77.12 deaths per…

“I know that I will miss being a student in the MPA-ESP program and working on valuable projects, like the Spring Workshop. Having had the experience of working with my team on a real-life project for our non-profit client has definitely made me feel more prepared for life after graduation,” stated Andrew McCornack, a member…

Yesterday we left our first study region with new samples from the seafloor and a healthy respect for the ocean currents that can erode sediment deep in the ocean. The seafloor we surveyed was heavily eroded and we had to look carefully before finding sites that were promising enough to try sampling. Even then we…

Evidence of the retreat of glaciers since the last glacial maximum (check), flying over sites of ancient Inuit, Norse and present day settlements (check), and a personal recollection of my own past in this location (check).

A single industry accounts for around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. It produces a material so ubiquitous it is nearly invisible: cement. It is the primary ingredient in concrete, which in turn forms the foundations and structures of the buildings we live and work in, and the roads and bridges we drive…

The weather started to get increasingly worse yesterday, with a lot of clouds, low visibility and snow. That, of course, means that we couldn’t go out flying for two days. The forecast for the next 24 hours doesn’t look promising either. But as usual in the Arctic it’s better not to forecast — everything might…

Approximately one in eight children dies before the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa – a rate that has been declining, but is still nearly 20 times higher than in developed nations. A new Lancet study out this week suggests that the multiple interventions applied in the Millennium Villages Project are having a significant impact,…
Undergraduate students learn about summer field opportunities in Jordan, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico offered through the Summer Ecosystems Experience for Undergraduate (SEE-U) program at Columbia.
The 2012 field season started out better than we could hope for. The weather has been great for flying out onto the ice and sampling water from the Arctic ocean. We were able to get water samples from three stations, including one at the North Pole.