The highlight of this week was the awarding of the 2015 Vetlesen Prize to Stephen Sparks of the University of Bristol at a black-tie dinner ceremony in Low Library on Wednesday evening. One of the world’s foremost volcanologists, Steve visited Lamont on Monday to deliver a lecture on “How volcanoes work” to a full house in the Monell Auditorium. On Wednesday morning, Steve and a number of other volcanologists, petrologists, and Earth scientists who traveled to New York to help celebrate the prize event were treated to a two-hour symposium on volcano and magma research at Lamont organized by Terry Plank. The symposium featured short presentations by Tim Crone, Elizabeth Ferriss, Chris Havlin, Einat Lev, Alex Lloyd, Patricia Nadeau, Jean-Arthur Olive, Elise Rumpf, Philipp Ruprecht, Yakov Weiss, and Cian Wilson.
I am pleased to report that four of our Lamont Assistant Professors have received promotions. As of next month, Natalie Boelman, Billy D’Andrea, Michael Previdi, and Beizhan Yan will be Lamont Associate Professors (Junior Staff). Congratulations to all on your new rank!
Wally Broecker collected another honorary degree this week, this one from Oxford University (http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-02-19-oxford-announces-honorary-degrees-2015). The degree was awarded in 2014, but Wally was unable to attend the ceremony last year. Kudos once again, Wally!
At the CLIVAR International Symposium on Tropical Ocean and Climate, held last week in Qingdao, China, Xiaoqiong (Sage) Li won an Excellent Student Presentation Award. Sage’s presentation was on “Recent and future changes in the Asian monsoon – ENSO relationship: Natural or forced?” Congratulations, Sage!
The Biology and Paleo Environment Division this week welcomed visiting postdoctoral scientist Alison O’Donnell. Supported by a Research Collaboration Award from her home institution, the University of Western Australia, Alison will spend seven weeks at Lamont’s Tree-Ring Laboratory to learn methodologies that will permit her to develop a drought atlas for Western Australia. Her host at Lamont is Ed Cook.
The R/V Langseth continued its work off New Jersey this week on its current expedition, led by Greg Mountain of Rutgers University, to conduct three-dimensional multi-channel seismic exploration of a portion of the continental shelf that encompasses three International Ocean Drilling Program drill holes. Nearly three-quarters of the planned seismic lines have been acquired, and the cruise is scheduled to end in about 10 days, at which time the ship will return to New York City.
On Monday I hosted a meeting of the directors of the Earth Institute units on the Lamont Campus, including the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, and the Center for Agriculture and Food Security. The focus of the meeting, one of a regular series, was on budgets for fiscal years 2015 and 2016, particularly on indirect cost recovery and intercampus and inter-unit transfers.
Meredith Nettles is the coauthor of a paper posted online yesterday by Science Express that documents GPS, photographic, and seismic records of the calving of a large iceberg from the distal edge of a glacier in Greenland. The combined data elucidate the forces and displacements on the edge of the ice sheet and the underlying solid Earth during such events. Moreover, they provide a recipe for remote characterization of similar calving events – which contribute one-third to one-half of Greenland’s rate of ice loss – from global seismic observations. Over the last two decades, the rate of these glacial earthquakes has increased by nearly an order of magnitude and the events have spread northward, both presumably in response to regional warming. A Kevin Krajick story on the paper was posted yesterday to our web site (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/glacial-earthquakes-may-help-forecast-sea-level-rise), and stories quoting Meredith appeared yesterday on National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/25/417457888/study-reveals-what-happens-during-a-glacial-earthquake) and in The Washington Post(http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/25/giant-earthquakes-are-shaking-greenland-and-scientists-just-figured-out-the-disturbing-reason-why/).
On Friday last week, Adam Sobel was featured on “Academic Minute” and devoted his minute to the Madden-Julian oscillation, the largest component of intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere. Adam termed the MJO “the most important atmospheric phenomenon you’ve never heard of, until now” (http://academicminute.org/2015/06/adam-sobel-columbia-madden-julian-oscillation/).
Yesterday, SciTech Now posted a video, 35 seconds longer than a minute, of Christine McCarthy giving an answer to the question “What’s inside the Earth?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLL_LAYTDdA).
With the solstice last Sunday, we are officially in Earth’s northern summer season. May you all enjoy unseasonably cool weekend temperatures as you try to discern the onset of progressively shorter daylight hours for the next six months.
Sean