Lamont Weekly Report, February 6, 2015

    For a second week in a row, campus operations were disrupted by snow, the result this week of a storm that began Sunday night. And once again, Lenny Sullivan, Bruce Baez, Tom Burke, Carmine Cavaliere, Bob Daly, Tony De Loatch, Charles Jones, Stevenson Louis, Mike McHugh, Ray Slavin, Eric Soto, Kevin Sullivan, and Rick Trubiroha put in a long night to clear and salt campus roads and walkways. From 1:30 am on Sunday night until the middle of the next day, our 13-man crew worked to ensure that our offices and labs could open at 11 am on Monday. For another week, thank you, gentlemen!
 
    Two new postdoctoral scientists arrived shortly after this week’s snowfall.
 
    On Monday, Christopher Havlin joined the Seismology, Geology and Tectonophysics Division as Postdoctoral Research Scientist. Chris completed his Ph.D. last fall at Brown University, under the supervision of Marc Parmentier and Greg Hirth, on the development of theoretical models for the transport of melt from the convecting mantle into the overlying lithosphere. At Lamont Chris will work with Ben Holtzman on models of viscoelastic plate boundaries that explicitly include coupling among temperature, melt migration, and deformation and that can predict seismic velocity and attenuation structures for comparison with measurements.
 
    On Thursday, the Marine Geology and Geophysics Division welcomed the arrival of Lamont Postdoctoral Fellow Jean-Arthur Olive. A marine geophysicist with a fresh Ph.D. from the Joint Program in Oceanography of MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, completed under the supervision of Mark Behn, Jean-Arthur is broadly interested in mid-ocean ridge processes, particularly the interactions among magmatism, thermal stress and cracking, and hydrothermal circulation. At Lamont he can be expected to interact with Tim Crone, Marc Spiegelman, Roger Buck, Maya Tolstoy, Suzanne Carbotte, Felix Waldhauser, and Spahr Webb, among others.
 
    Visiting the Marine Geology and Geophysics Division for three weeks is Carlo Doglioni, from the University of Rome. A geologist and tectonophysicist, Carlo has worked on the relationship between global tectonics and the westward drift of the lithosphere and on the mechanisms of earthquakes in regions of lithospheric extension (http://www.dst.uniroma1.it/dst1/index.php/it/persone/206-geodynamics-doglioni). He will be giving the Geodynamics Seminar next Monday and the MGG/SGT Seminar next Wednesday. Carlo’s host at Lamont is Alberto Malinverno.
 
    A paper posted online yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters by Maya Tolstoy documents relations among volcanism along mid-ocean ridges, changes in ocean loading, and orbital variations associated with Milankovitch cycles on timescales between a fortnight and 100,000 years. She has compared the timing of individual volcanic eruptions with tidal modulations and time of year, and she has correlated variations in seafloor bathymetry with proxies for sea level and the areal extent of glaciation. These relations raise the question of whether variations in the volcanic flux along mid-ocean ridges can – e.g., through the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – contribute as well as respond to climate change. A Kevin Krajick story on Maya’s article may be found on the Lamont web pages (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/seafloor-volcano-pulses-may-alter-climate).
 
    Several Lamont scientists have been in the news recently. Late last week, Glacier Hub ran an article (http://glacierhub.org/2015/01/30/earthquakes-rattling-glaciers-boosting-sea-level-rise/) on the work of Meredith Nettles on glacial earthquakes and their relation to changes in ice sheet dynamics in a warming climate. An article Wednesday on Inside Climate News quotes Klaus Jacob on development plans in New York City for low-lying areas flooded during Hurricane Sandy (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20150204/de-blasio-plans-affordable-housing-areas-swamped-hurricane-sandy). A story yesterday on Nautilus mentions work by Tim Creyts and his colleagues on the role of basal meltwater in the erosive action of Antarctic ice sheets (http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/secrets-in-the-ice). Also yesterday, World Science Festival posted a video explanation by Heather Savage of the relation between hydraulic fracturing and induced earthquakes (http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2015/02/fracking-earthquakes/).
 
    One of next week’s highlights will be the 20th Annual W. S. Jardetzky Lecture. The Jardetzky Lecture series, begun in 1992, was established by a gift from Oleg Jardetzky to honor his father, Wenceslas Jardetzky, the mathematical geophysicist who worked at Lamont from 1949 to 1962 (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/about-ldeo/office-director/internal-awards/jardetzky-lecturer). Next week’s Jardetzky Lecturer will be seismologist and geodesist Roger Bilham, a former Lamont staff member and now a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The topic of Roger’s lecture is “The southern edge of the Eurasian plate: A fatal blend of earthquakes and corruption.”
 
    In the meantime, the Earth Science Colloquium this afternoon will feature Rob Evans, a Senior Scientist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (http://www.whoi.edu/hpb/Site.do?id=382). If you’d like to learn about water in a different form and a different place from the snow and ice that coats our campus, come hear Rob speak on the topic of “Water, water, everywhere: Some geophysical approaches to mapping water beneath the seafloor” (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/files/uploaded/image/file/Rob%20Evans.pdf). I hope to see you there.
 
       Sean