The week before the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting is always unusually busy. This week featured both the last day of fall semester classes on Monday and the start of the holiday party season at Lamont. Holiday festivities were kicked off on Thursday by the Geochemistry Division’s holiday luncheon, organized by Arlene Suriani and her colleagues and held in the Comer Café. This morning, the staff of the Lamont Café – Chef Richard, Beth, Laura, Seth, and Joe – hosted a complimentary holiday breakfast.
Oh, and the U.S. House of Representatives passed an omnibus appropriations bill last night only a few hours before the federal government would have had to shut down as spending approval expired.
In the category of good news this week, Paul Olsen learned that he is to receive the 2015 Thomas Jefferson Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Natural Science. The medal is awarded by the Virginia Museum of Natural History and is given “to a scientist who has made significant scientific contributions in the broad area of natural history.” Paul will receive the medal at a ceremony in February at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Congratulations, Paul!
Lamont’s Advisory Board met in the Comer Building on Wednesday afternoon. Following meetings of the Board’s committees on Membership, Marketing, Risk, and Education, the full Board heard reports on scientific progress and fundraising over the last quarter. The highlight of the meeting was a presentation by Tim Crone and Ryan Abernathey on Lamont’s Real-Time Earth initiative. This session was the final meeting for long-time Board member George Becker, whose many contributions to Lamont were recognized by all in attendance.
This evening at the International Center of Photography, Billy D’Andrea will be the latest Lamont scientist to be featured in the center’s Friday Evenings with Climate Scientists series (http://www.icp.org/events/2014/december/12/friday-evenings-climate-scientists-william-dandrea). The series is part of the partnership this fall among ICP, Lamont, and IRI to exploit the interface between science and art to raise public awareness of climate change.
Lamont is much in the news this week. Richard Seager was lead author for a report, prepared for NOAA and released on Monday, which concluded that California’s extreme drought is primarily the result of natural climate variability over the past three years and that anthropogenic climate change played at most a minor role. The report drew the attention of NBC News (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/global-warming-isnt-causing-california-drought-report-triggers-storm-n263941), The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/science/earth/california-drought-is-said-to-have-natural-cause-.html?_r=1), and many other media.
Ryan Abernathey was featured in a sidebar to an article posted Wednesday by New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26670-earth-wind-and-data-making-sense-of-our-planet.html?full=true#.VIruuieI4ou) on the need for large data sets in Earth science. The December issue of Mental Floss featured an article on Marie Tharp and the impact on the geological sciences of her pioneering maps of sea-floor depth (http://mentalfloss.com/article/60481/how-one-womans-discovery-shook-foundations-geology). New this week to the Observatory’s “Peering Through Polar Ice” blog is a piece by Rebecca Fowler on this season’s Antarctic fieldwork by Lamont scientists, including Sonya Dyhrman, Sid Hemming, Trevor Williams, and the IcePod team of Robin Bell, Chris Bertinato, Winnie Chu, Tej Dhakal, and Nick Frearson (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/research/blogs/peering-through-polar-ice).
This afternoon there will be a quarterly meeting of Lamont’s Senior Staff. Agenda items include presentations on the results of the Lamont Research Professor survey conducted earlier this year as well as on the findings from focus group discussions held shortly after the survey.
For all who are heading to the AGU Fall Meeting, the reception co-hosted by Lamont and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences will be at the usual time (Tuesday, 6:30 to 8:30 pm) and at the usual hotel (San Francisco Marriott Union Square). The reception will be on a different floor (Union Square Ballroom–Mezzanine) from that of recent years, however, to provide a bit more elbow room for the growing number of attendees. I hope to see many of you there.
Sean