Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory140
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Summer Heat Wave May Have Triggered Landslide on Lonely Alaskan Glacier
A massive landslide in Alaska’s snowy Wrangell-St. Elias mountain range in July may have been caused by a summer heat wave making some slopes more vulnerable to collapse, says the Lamont-Doherty scientist who first discovered the avalanche.
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Q&A: Climate Change, Drought and the Future
“One of the ways that climate change is going to manifest is through warmer temperatures. … What we are seeing, in line with our projections, is that even if you assume constant precipitation, the temperature effects are so large that it is going to dry things out. This is going to have really big impacts…
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Seismology as Performance Art
Ideally, seismic stations are sited in remote, quiet locations. But other considerations are important for a good station, particularly security. As a result, we placed most of our stations in towns near schools, hospitals or town halls, where people could keep an eye on them.
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Surface Views of the Southern East Africa Rift Inspire a Look Underground
Driving around the Rungwe volcanic province in the southern East Africa Rift installing seismometers, we have the chance to observe first hand how geological processes in action create the most dramatic forms at Earth’s surface.
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Tackling an Ice Age Mystery
In a new study in Nature, climate scientist Maureen Raymo and her colleagues show that variations in sunlight interact with Earth’s topography and the size of ice sheets to control Earth’s ice ages on 100,000 year cycles. One important finding: as ice sheets grow bigger, they also become more vulnerable to melting.
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Imaging beneath the southernmost volcanoes in the East Africa Rift
The last time we visited the southern part of the East Africa Rift, we were responding to an unusual series of earthquakes in December 2009 that shook northern Malawi. This time, we return to this part of the rift system as a part of a more comprehensive effort to understand the underpinnings of this continental…
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Only 144 Miles, Yet Worlds Apart
144 miles separates Kangerlussuaq from Raven Camp. Not far really, just 144 miles – like traveling from the southern tip of New York City up to Albany. Flying at 270 knots we can be there in about half an hour, no time at all, and yet to the casual observer they seem worlds apart.
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Gone Fishing…Took IcePod!
When we sat down to map out the flight plan, our request to the crew for locating lakes met with an easy nod: No problem at all. It took only seconds to register that our definition of lakes might differ from theirs.
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‘Lipreading’ the Icesheet
Even the most skilled of English language lipreaders are only able to tease apart about 30 percent of the information being shared, I read in a recent article. The author, herself deaf, noted that in some transmissions, the information capture is higher, while in others, nothing is collected. An average of 30 percent information transfer…most…
