Tag: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory172
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Night Watchman
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: PUNTA ARENAS, Chile–I have become a night watchman of sorts. The gravimeter we’re using in our flights over Antarctica must remain powered at all times, so between flights I hole up in the old terminal next to the aircraft watching, …and watching. We won’t be on the…
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Test Flight
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: The flight engineer ticks off instruments over the intercom. “LVIS, ready.” “Gravity, ready.” “DACOM, ready.” We are about to take the DC-8 on its first test flight before Antarctica. The pilots, clipped and professional, have just described the day’s flight plans and the plane is bustling with…
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Polar Survival a Century Ago: Good Planning, or Just Good Weather?
Before airplanes and satellite phones, polar exploration was a more dangerous undertaking than it is now. Many who set out for the frozen ends of the earth did not come back. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and British explorer Ernest Shackleton were some of the few who brought their entire crews home safely. Nansen began his…
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Thinking on Your Feet on the Ice
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: I’m a senior engineer at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and my role in Operation Ice Bridge is to work with the gravimeter. This instrument can see beneath ice sheets into the water and bedrock below to reveal the ice sheet’s hidden contours – critical information…
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A New Way to Experience Antarctica
Michael Studinger, Instrument Co-Principal Investigator, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: The scale and style of Operation Ice Bridge will be a new experience for me. I’ve been involved in airborne research for more than a decade using ice-penetrating radar systems, airborne laser scanning, gravity and magnetics to learn more about the polar ice caps and how they…
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Sea Change
Bärbel Hönisch, an expert on ocean acidification at Columbia, will speak after a screening of the film “A Sea Change” this Thursday.
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Shaking Out Some Money
That rumbling you feel is not necessarily a passing subway. New York City and the surrounding region gets a surprising number of small earthquakes, and a 2008 study from the region’s network of seismographs, run by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, suggests that the risk of a damaging one is not negligible. This week, the federal government announced a major upgrade…
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Turning CO2 Into Stone
A power plant in Iceland is set to become the first in the world to try turning carbon dioxide emissions into solid minerals underground, starting this September.
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Down by the River, Running Out of Water
Too little water for too many people is a growing problem in poor countries–and in thriving suburban Rockland County, N.Y., just north of New York City. A new website, Water Resources in Rockland County, lays out the case, and neatly puts it into global context. The site is run by the Earth Institute’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network…
