Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory163
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Investigating Giant, Unseen Landslides
Steep mountains produce some of the biggest landslides on earth but in such rugged terrain who’s around to notice? These monster back country slides are now gaining attention from far-away scientists, aided by a global network of seismic stations, earth-orbiting satellites and the crowd-sourcing power of the internet.
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Press-Ewing Seismograph on Jeopardy!
An important piece of earthquake-science history popped up a few weeks ago on Jeopardy!: “The Press-Ewing was an early seismograph, recording waves from these events. If you didn’t know a Press-Ewing from a French press, you were in luck. For $200, all you needed to know to formulate the question is what a seismograph measures.…
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The Art of Flying
Flying. It is something we are almost all familiar with, and yet I expect few of us have really sat back to appreciate the actual science of it. For the past 10 weeks we have been flying, not just a day or two a week but five or six days a week depending on the…
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The ‘Glory’ in Clouds and Other Amazing Sights!
If you look carefully at the picture below you will see a small shadow of our plane completely encircled in a rainbow. This optical phenomenon, called a “glory,” can develop when the plane flies directly between the sun and a cloud below. Flying over the ice sheet in the far northeast of Greenland we saw…
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Under Arctic Ice: Watch the Video
The video depicts the activities of the LDEO Switchyard field team, which deploys annually and uses ski-equipped aircraft to reach a series of sample sites between the North Pole and Ellesmere Island in Canada.
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The End of the Line
The R/V Oscar Dyson pulled into Dutch Harbor, Alaska on May 9 after a hectic few final days! We are now starting to sift through the hundreds of samples and a hard-drive worth of data we shipped back, unpacking our eleven boxes of gear, and re-packing perhaps even more for an upcoming cruise off the…
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Lessons From a Rock Fall
A 500-foot-high sliver of the Palisades Cliff came crashing down May 12 at 7:28 p.m., jiggling our seismometer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory a few micrometers. Weighing about 10,000 tons, the rock smashed trees along the Hudson River and covered over a hiking trail, but fortunately caused no injuries.
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Final Days in Alert
Time is flying, bringing us to our final days in Alert. We were able to recover samples from 12 stations, which is a great success and the second most successful year on record. Thanks to everyone who made it happen: Dale, Richard and Dan who went out every possible day to collect samples; Al and…
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A Walk against Cancer
Alert hosted the first northernmost cancer-fighting fundraising event “Relay for Life,” an event sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society to celebrate cancer survivors, remember loved ones lost to cancer and fight back against all cancers. The 12-hour-walk was organized by Kristy Doyle, who lost her grandfather to cancer in 2010. Participants raised a whopping $7,580 and collectively…
You Asked invites you to share your most pressing questions about climate, science, and sustainability. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia Climate School experts will respond with clear, evidence-based answers. Pose your questions and story ideas!
