Lamont Weekly Report, February 20, 2015

       One week after the Boston area set a record for snowfall within a 30-day period, record low temperatures for the date were reached this week in Chicago, New York, and other Midwestern and eastern cities. It is a winter to remember.

 
    Notwithstanding the cold temperatures, there is good news to warm the spirit.
 
    I am pleased to announce that Christine McCarthy has been named a Lamont Assistant Research Professor, effective this month. An expert in the experimental measurement of the deformation of Earth materials under a range of conditions, Christine had been studying the frictional properties of ice as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Heather Savage’s rock mechanics laboratory since 2011. She holds undergraduate degrees in both geophysics and communications, and she completed her Ph.D. at Brown University under the supervision of Reid Cooper. Before coming to Lamont, Christine spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Yasuko Takei at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo.
 
    Heather figures in another announcement as well. She and Pratigya Polissar have received the Palisades Geophysical Institute Young Scientist Award. This award was open to all members of Lamont’s Junior Staff, on both the Lamont Research Professor and Research Scientist tracks, and 24 of our early-career scientists submitted applications in response to a solicitation earlier this year. A selection committee had the extraordinarily difficult job of ranking the applicants, but the recommendation to split the award between Heather and Pratigya was unanimous.
 
    To Christine, Heather, and Pratigya, congratulations on your new positions!
 
    Al Hofmann arrived on campus this week for his annual spring visit to Lamont. A geochemist who has made seminal contributions to our understanding of Earth’s mantle and crust, Al is an Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, a recipient of the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society and the Hess Medal from the American Geophysical Union, and a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Al will also receive the 2015 Harold Urey Award from the European Association of Geochemistry at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague this August (http://www.eag.eu.com/awards/urey-award/albrecht-hofmann/). While at Lamont, Al will co-lead the “Hot Topics” Seminar in Geochemistry.
 
    On Monday afternoon, Shuoshuo Han successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, co-supervised by Suzanne Carbotte and John Mutter. Her thesis topic was “Accretion and subduction of oceanic lithosphere: 2D and 3D studies of off-axis magma lenses at East Pacific Rise 9°37-40’N area and downgoing Juan de Fuca plate at Cascadia Subduction Zone.” Presumably Dr. Han was more upgoing than downgoing by the time the defense was over.
 
    On Tuesday, 17 February, Susan Roberts, Director of the Ocean Studies Board, and Don Forsyth, the James L. Manning Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, gave a presentation to the Lamont community on the recently released decadal survey for the ocean sciences. Requested by the National Science Foundation and entitled Sea Change: 2015-2025 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences, the report outlines priorities for oceanographic research and facilities for the next 10 years (http://nas-sites.org/dsos2015/). Don was a member of the report's authoring committee. For those who missed the event, a video of the briefing will be posted on the Lamont web pages.
 
    In Thursday’s issue of Nature magazine is an article, on which Terry Plank and Spahr Webb are coauthors, reporting new three-dimensional images of shear wave velocity in the upper mantle beneath the Lau Basin, a back-arc basin with multiple spreading centers and a range of distances from the subduction zone along the Tonga Trench. The authors, led by Shawn Wei and Doug Wiens of Washington University, argue that the seismic images – derived from the tomographic inversion of Rayleigh wave records from ocean-bottom seismometers and land stations – permit the effects on wave speed and magma production of decompression melting and melting enhanced by the flux of water from the subducting slab of Pacific plate lithosphere to be distinguished.
 
    The Lamont Log this week features the first of a series of blogs from Kyle Frischkorn, posted from Nouméa, New Caledonia, where he is preparing to embark on an oceanographic cruise on the R/V L’Atlantique designed to study how microorganisms in the South Pacific Ocean influence the marine ecosystem and the carbon cycle (http://lamontlog.tumblr.com/post/111291182057/bonjour-de-noumea). Kyle’s particular focus is the cyanobacterium Trichodesmium, which fixes carbon through photosynthesis and transforms atmospheric nitrogen to a form usable by other microorganisms. And, as a special treat, the Log has a photo, nearly three decades old, of Mark Cane being greeted by Pope John Paul II during a climate conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy.
 
    On Monday evening next week, Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum will launch the new university initiative, led by Adam Sobel, on Extreme Weather and Climate. The Forum event, to be held in Low Library starting at 6 pm, will be a panel discussion on “Preparing for extreme weather: Global lessons from Sandy” (http://www.worldleaders.columbia.edu/events/preparing-extreme-weather-global-lessons-sandy). Adam will serve as moderator, and panelists will include IRI’s Lisa Goddard; Cynthia Rosenzweig from GISS; Mike Gerrard, Director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law; and Daniel Zarrilli, Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency. The event is cosponsored by Lamont, the Earth Institute, and the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research.
 
    On Wednesday next week, the external committee to review the Earth Institute – Christopher Boone, Dean and Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University; George Philander, the Knox Taylor Professor of Geoscience at Princeton University; and Maria Zuber, the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Vice President for Research at MIT – will visit the Lamont Campus. The committee will meet with groups of scientists from the Observatory, IRI, CIESIN, and the Ag Center to hear about the breadth of research being conducted on the campus and in partnership with EI units at the Mailman School and on the Morningside Campus.
 
    In the meantime, today’s Earth Science Colloquium will be given by physicist, biogeochemist, and paleoceanographer Richard Zeebe, a Professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii (http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe.html), located in one of the few U.S. cities not affected by this week’s Arctic-like weather. Richard will be speaking on “Past and present consequences of massive carbon release for the Earth system” (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/files/uploaded/image/file/Richard%20Zeebe.pdf). I hope that you will join the audience.
 
       Sean