Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory161
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Off to Lima, World’s Second Largest Desert City
18th June 2011 Lima, Peru Our 2011 field season is underway. After a full day’s travel from New York, we arrived in Lima, the capital of Peru. This sprawling city perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is home to more than nine million people and, after Cairo, is the largest desert city in…
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The Alaska Peninsula from the Skies
The first component of our program is to deploy seismometers onshore around the Alaska Peninsula. These instruments are very sensitive, so they can record small, local earthquakes, distant large earthquakes and (importantly for our project) the sound source of the R/V Langseth. However, there are no roads connecting towns on the Alaska peninsula, so one…
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Deciphering Past Climate Change in the High Andes
High above the tropical lowlands, the Andes form a formidable topographic barrier separating the coastal deserts in the west from the Amazon rainforest to the east. The Peruvian Andes are the highest peaks in all the tropics and, despite their proximity to the equator, are mantled with snow and ice. However, the glaciers clinging to…
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Mapping the Alaska Megathrust
Two tectonic plates converge along a 2,500-kilometer-long subduction zone offshore southern Alaska. Stress builds up at the contact between these plates, which is released in large, destructive earthquakes like the recent event offshore Japan. One of the big conundrums about these settings is how large of an area locks up on the contact between these…
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Time and Technology and the Really Down Deep
Two years before Google Earth was launched, Bill Ryan and Suzanne Carbotte, oceanographers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, began a project to transform the way we look at the ocean. They started collecting reams of data that had been gathered by scientists sailing on research vessels all over the world since the 1980s, one ship…
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New Google Ocean Maps Dive Deep
Up Close and Personal With Landscapes of the Abyss
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Rhone Glacier Finely Tuned to Climate Changes
By chiseling hunks of stone from recently exposed bedrock near the edge of the Rhone Glacier, scientists were able to decipher the comings and goings of the ice over the past 11,000 years. That should help predict what will happen to glaciers in the warming world to come.
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Tree Rings Open Door on 1,100 Years of El Niño
Scientists have used tree-ring data from the American Southwest to reconstruct a 1,100-year history of the El Niño cycle that shows that, when the earth warms, the climate acts up. The research may improve scientists’ ability to predict future climate and the effects of global warming.
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Switchyard Project: A Very Successful Year
The 2011 field season has been a very very successful year, in fact the most successful one we have ever had. The weather has been great, the equipment proved to be mostly reliable, the people have been great and the samples are plenty.
