Director's Weekly Reports

The week began with the third in our Spring Public Lectures, given at Lamont Sunday afternoon by Emily Klein, on sabbatical leave this spring from Duke University as a Visiting Senior Research Scientist in the Observatory’s Geochemistry Division. Emily spoke on “Volcanoes and vents: A hidden world beneath the sea” to an appreciative audience.

Late last week, Lamont’s IcePod team of 10 scientists and engineers flew to Greenland with the 109^th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard. Mounted on the outer hull of an LC-130, the IcePod imaging system includes a deep-ice radar, a shallow-ice radar, a LIDAR, an infrared camera, a visible photogrammetric camera, and a precis....

Through much of the week, the warmth and sunshine made a convincing case that the spring season is underway, at least in our part of the globe.

I am pleased to report that Alex Chekalyuk has received an Antarctica Service Medal. The medal is awarded by the National Science Foundation in recognition of service on a U. S. Antarctic expedition. According to the Foundation’s website, “the outer bands of black and dark blue [on the medal’s ribbon] comprise five-twelfths of the ribbon’s width,....

The first full week of spring has brought the welcome change that the Sun is once again in the sky for a majority of each day.

This week began with the loss of an hour’s sleep, as the onset of Daylight Savings Time was ushered in by the second Sunday in March.

The week ended with the sad news that Karl Turekian passed away this afternoon. A giant in geochemistry, Karl was both an alumnus (Ph.D., 1955) and a great friend of Columbia and Lamont. A note from his department chair at Yale directs Karl’s friends anc.....

In the first week following sequestration of the federal budget, we all await the sound of a second shoe hitting the floor above, but business otherwise proceeds as usual.

Tiffany Shaw learned this week that she is to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The NSF website states that “the…CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National....

The highlight of this week was the award of the Vetlesen Prize on Thursday evening to Jean Jouzel, of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, and Susan Solomon, of MIT. Attendance at the reception, dinner, and awards ceremony in the Low Library rotunda exceeded 230, a record for a Vetlesen Prize evening. Many from Lamont attended in their formal wear, including a number of graduate students and alumni. Also joining the occasion were....

The end of the week finds all of us witnessing the arrival of blizzard conditions, after the cancellation today of several Lamont seminars, meetings, and the Earth Science Colloquium. And this on a day when an ancestor to placental mammals, including Homo Sapiens,.....

The week began with the inauguration of our nation’s President for a second term. His inaugural address on Monday included a full paragraph worthy of sustained note by all of us, clearly focused as it was on those challenges addressed daily at Lamont and across the Earth Institute:

The week has been filled with good news.

On Monday, word came from the International Association for the Physical Sciences in the Ocean (IAPSO) that Arnold Gordon is to receive the association’s Prince Albert I Medal for 2013. The medal, named for prince of Monaco who was the founding president of the organization from which IAPSO evolved, is awarded once every two years. Only the seventh recipient of this medal, Arnold was cited “for his outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the general circulation of the ocean and especially for his studies of the Southern Ocean and inter-ocean exchange.” The medal will be awarded at the next IAPSO General Assembly, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in July...