natural disasters6
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Detecting Landslides from a Few Seismic Wiggles
Over the last six years, seismologists Göran Ekström and Colin Stark have been perfecting a technique for picking out the seismic signature of large landslides. They just discovered North America’s largest known landslide in many years – 200 million tons of sliding rock in Alaska.
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Testing the Speed of Lava: What It Says about Escape Times & Mars
Elise Rumpf’s lava flow simulations are yielding new details about the velocity of lava over different surfaces. They may also hold clues about the surfaces of other planets.
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Watch: Using Climate Information to Boost Resiliency
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its partners work in some of the most impoverished areas of the world to increase food security, decrease vulnerability to disasters and predict outbreaks of diseases such as malaria.
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American Geophysical Union 2015: Key Earth Institute Events
Scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute will present important findings at the American Geophysical Union fall 2015 meeting, Dec. 14-18–the world’s largest gathering of earth and space scientists.
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Spring 2016 Undergraduate Research Assistant Opportunities
The Earth Institute will offer nine research assistant opportunities for undergraduate students during the Spring 2016 semester.
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Tubewells to the Rescue
The resistivity testing was hampered by bad roads and flooded fields. The augering was proving similarly difficult in the thick muds of the abandoned channel. It was time to change to our alternative plan: drilling with tube wells. That worked better and we had turned a corner.
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Joaquin? There’s No Perfect Forecast, So Stay Tuned
What will Hurricane Joaquin do? The science of predicting that is getting better, but still uncertain. The debate today is over whether there will be a U.S. landfall now in five or more days’ time or not; 30 years ago there would have been no point in even having that discussion.
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How Superstorm Sandy Inspired an Award-Winning Book
“A lot of the challenge is understanding what we as a species should do, because the disasters are getting more prevalent. In the last hundred years, both in human and financial costs, damages are skyrocketing. Most of that is just more people living in dangerous places, but climate change will be more of a factor…
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Post-Sandy Rebuilding for Resiliency: Lessons From Long Beach, NY
It is not that people have gotten amnesia and don’t remember the damage of Hurricane Sandy. Some homes are still being rebuilt and some people are still displaced. Moreover, the people who lead the shore towns in Long Island and New Jersey are speaking the language of climate resiliency.
By studying thousands of buildings and analyzing their electricity use, Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson has been able to uncover ways to significantly cut energy consumption and emissions. Watch the Video: “Engineering a Cooler Future Through Smarter Buildings“
