American Geophysical Union 2016 Archives - State of the Planet

Creating Earthquake Heat Maps: Temperature Spikes Leave Clues in the Rock

When a fault slips, the temperature can spike by hundreds of degrees, high enough to alter organic compounds in the rocks and leave a signature. Lamont scientists have developed methods to use those organic signatures to reconstruct past earthquakes and better understand what controls them.

by |December 16, 2016

Learning from Slow-Slip Earthquakes

Off the coast of New Zealand, there is an area where earthquakes can happen in slow-motion as two tectonic plates grind past one another. These slow-slip events create an ideal lab for studying fault behavior along the shallow portion of subduction zones.

by |December 15, 2016
Greenland's ice can "darken" in ways we can see and ways we can't. Photo: Marco Tedesco

State of the Arctic: Longer Melting Seasons, Thinning Sea Ice

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and scientists are seeing the effects across ice and ecosystems. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Marco Tedesco describes the changes underway.

by |December 13, 2016

IEDA: Revolutionizing Big Data

The Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance is fueling groundbreaking multi-disciplinary discoveries worldwide. “This is a new era of data mining,” says IEDA Director Kerstin Lehnert, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

by |December 13, 2016

Spy Satellites Reveal the Himalayas’ Changing Glaciers – in 3D

Declassified spy satellite images are beginning to provide the first consistent look at how glaciers across the Himalayas are changing and what future water supplies might look like for millions of people.

by |December 12, 2016

Live from San Francisco: Science from Lamont

Earth scientists from around the world will be in San Francisco next week to share their latest discoveries at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. You can watch several of their presentations live online through AGU On-Demand, including seven involving scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

by |December 7, 2016

AGU 2016: Key Events From the Earth Institute

Scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute will present important findings at this year’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest gathering of earth and space scientists.

by |November 29, 2016