Lamont Weekly Report, July 10, 2015

   The summer is nearly half over. Whether you measure the season’s midpoint by Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game or the day halfway between Columbia University’s Commencement Day and Labor Day, both metrics give the same answer: next Tuesday. Nonetheless, the pace of scientific progress on our campus showed no evidence of mid-summer doldrums. 

     On Monday, Stacy Morford joined the Observatory as our new Senior Communications Officer in the office of Development, Communications, and Strategic Initiatives. With degrees in journalism and education, Stacy spent 10 years as a reporter and wire editor for Associated Press in New York City. After editorial posts at Current Events Magazine,InsideClimate News, and Education Week, Stacy served for three years as Senior Online Communications Officer for the World Bank with a portfolio that included sustainable development, climate change, and disaster risk management. Please join me in welcoming Stacy to Lamont!
 
     Also on Monday, the R/V Langseth returned to SUNY Maritime College after completing its most recent expedition, led by Greg Mountain of Rutgers University, to conduct three-dimensional multi-channel seismic imaging of a portion of the continental shelf off New Jersey that preserves a record of past rises and falls in sea level. Robert Steinhaus writes that the ship set multiple records on the cruise, including total multichannel seismic sail-line kilometers acquired (4260) and total common midpoint-processing line kilometers acquired (102,245 km). The latter figure is more than two and a half times the circumference of the Earth. In all, a very successful cruise!
 
     Einat Lev is coauthor on a paper in this month’s issue of Nature Geoscience reporting laboratory experiments designed to test the effectiveness of barriers to the flow of lava and analog liquids. The group argues that constructing a long barrier orthogonal to the flow or dividing the flow into branches will each decelerate the flow, but the height and orientation of the barrier are important to overall effectiveness. Their work has applications to the protection of specific targets downhill of actual lava flows. Einat and her colleagues also produced a video last week of the inaugural experiment in Lamont’s new fluids laboratory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwXRF2g8f_k&feature=youtu.be).
 
     Today’s issue of Science includes two articles on which Lamont scientists are coauthors. Andreas Thurnherr is coauthor of a Perspectives piece on the need for improved regulations for mining of the deep seabed for metals and rare-earth elements. And Mo Raymo is coauthor of a review paper on records of sea-level rise during periods of warm temperatures and loss of polar ice-sheet mass in the geological past.
 
     Tim Creyts was interviewed by VICE News about the ice cave in Washington that collapsed on Monday, killing one individual and injuring another five. As Tim explained in Wednesday’s story (https://news.vice.com/article/wildfires-in-a-rainforest-and-melting-ice-caves-high-temperatures-are-causing-havoc-in-washington), ice caves are a natural product of glacial hydrology.
 
     New to the Lamont website this week is a Kim Martineau story on a recent award from Columbia’s Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering (RISE) program to Ryan Abernathey, Joaquim Goes, and Helga Gomes, along with Tony Jebara at the university’s Data Science Institute (where Kim now works), to develop computer algorithms to track and understand blooms of the dinoflagellate Noctiluca scintillans in the Arabian Sea (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/clone-scientists-discover-worlds-oldest-stone-tools). In the last decade, Noctiluca has pushed diatoms from the base of the regional food web, markedly affecting commercial fishing catches in the area. Noctiluca hosts photosynthetic symbionts that impart a green color to the organisms, so blooms are readily mappable by satellite multispectral imaging. The research team will model the role of ocean currents on bloom development and apply machine learning methods to explore other physical and biological controls on the dynamics of the Noctiluca population.
 
     Another milestone next Tuesday will be the flyby of Pluto and its five moons by New Horizons (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/science/space/almost-time-for-plutos-close-up.html?_r=0). Pluto is the last of the “classical planets” to be visited by spacecraft (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/science/space/reaching-pluto-and-the-end-of-an-era-of-planetary-exploration.html). The transmission of images and other data from the flyby will consume a year and a half, given the limits to data rates from Pluto’s distance. The NASA probe is scheduled for a later encounter with a Kuiper Belt object still farther from the Sun.
 
     So in the midst of the heat and humidity of a mid-summer weekend in New York, you can at least think about what objects look like in the coldest and most distant reaches of our solar system.
 
 
                    Sean