Lamont Weekly Report, June 5, 2015

      

     The news this week from Washington has been discouraging. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the FY 2016 Commerce-Science-Justice Appropriations bill that funds NSF, NOAA, NASA, and several other agencies and departments. The bill includes substantial cuts to the budgets for the Geosciences Directorate at NSF, the Earth Science Division at NASA, and climate research programs at NOAA relative to current-year levels. The White House issued a Statement of Administration Position (SAP) in opposition to the House bill and threatened that the President’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto such legislation were it presented to him for signature in that form. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee handling the appropriations bill for the same agencies is scheduled to mark up its version next week.

 
     Fortunately, there has been better news locally. Bor-Ting Jong, a first-year graduate student in the Ocean and Climate Physics Division working under the supervision of Mingfang Ting, has just received a major scholarship from the Taiwan Ministry of Education. The one-time scholarship, awarded competitively on the basis of proposals submitted by the students, is designed to provide encouragement to young Taiwanese students studying abroad and to help improve the scientific research environment in Taiwan. Bor-Ting’s proposal was entitled “Anomalous California winter precipitation and possible implications for water resource management.”
 
     Earlier today, Marc Vankeuren successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Nick Christie-Blick. Marc’s thesis was on the topic of "A structural and 40Ar/39Ar geochronological re-evaluation of low-angle normal faults in southeastern Idaho.” To Dr. Vankeuren, congratulations!
 
     The Seismology, Geology and Tectonophysics Division this week welcomed the arrival of Visiting Senior Research Scientist Takashi Nakagawa from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). An expert in computational solutions to large-scale geodynamical problems, Takashi will be on sabbatical leave for one year from JAMSTEC’s Department of Mathematical Science and Advanced Technology. During his visit to Lamont, he'll be working with Marc Spiegelman and others on three-dimensional thermo-mechanical models of mantle convection, particularly the multi-scale interaction of regional plate boundary processes with global mantle dynamics.
 
     The Biology and Paleo Environment Division is pleased to report that they are hosting 17 interns this summer. In addition to ten Lamont Summer Interns listed in last week’s report, Mo Ïra Dion from Laval University is working with Solange Duhamel; Hastings High School student Katie Ross is working with Heather Ford; two students – Hannah George and Chiandredi Johnson from the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics – are working with Brendan Buckley and Rosanne D’Arrigo; and three students – Felipe Rodrigues from the SUNY Maritime College and Laura Feng and Tegan Gallina from the Bronx School of Science – are working with Joaquim Goes and Helga Gomes.
 
     This week’s arrivals are balanced by a notable departure. Pete Sobel will be leaving Lamont to assume the position of Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at the Rutgers University Foundation. We have begun the search to fill Pete's position, and in the interim I am pleased to report that Casey Supple, Director of Funding Initiatives at the Earth Institute, has volunteered her time and expertise, and those of her staff, to assist us in meeting short-term obligations and in developing a new plan for development and communications at the Observatory going forward. Today is Pete’s last day at the Observatory, and I hope that you will all join me in thanking him for his able leadership of all of our programs in development and communication over the past two years.
 
     On Saturday morning, the R/V Langseth sailed from SUNY Maritime College to embark on a cruise led by Greg Mountain of Rutgers University. The goal of the cruise, now well underway, is to conduct three-dimensional multi-channel seismic exploration of a portion of the continental shelf off New Jersey. The study area encompasses the three drill holes of IODP Expedition 313, and the seismic imaging will allow the information from those cores to be placed into spatial and temporal context and will improve more broadly our understanding of the history of sea level, deposition, and erosion along the eastern U.S. continental margin.
 
     On Monday, we began a series of meetings on Lamont’s strategic initiatives, designed to outline the next steps toward implementation of the initiatives laid out in Lamont’s Strategic Plan (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/about-ldeo/strategicplan). For a session on the Earthquakes and Faulting initiative, I was joined by Jim Gaherty, Heather Savage, Donna Shillington, and Felix Waldhauser, and Adam Sobel and Suzana Camargo led a session on our Extreme Weather and Climate initiative. Karen Buck, Kathy Callahan, Art Lerner-Lam, Rachel Roberts, Kim Schermerhorn, Pete Sobel, and Casey Supple participated in both meetings. Sessions on our initiatives on Climate and Life; Changing Ice, Changing Coastlines; and Earth in Real Time are scheduled for later this month. The goals of these meetings are to define the programmatic and infrastructural elements of each initiative and develop fundraising goals to move those initiatives forward.
 
     On Monday evening, I attended a meeting of the Earth Institute Management Advisory Board. Following an overview of the latest EI developments by Executive Director Steve Cohen, Board chair Bill Eimicke, Steve, and I summarized recent discussions about potential research partnerships between Lamont and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. I was then asked to describe Lamont’s Strategic Plan, and Casey Supple and I summarized plans for the 2015 Vetlesen Prize award ceremony later this month. One of Steve’s goals in asking me to participate in these meetings is to continue to educate the Board about what goes on at Lamont and the many interconnections between the Observatory and other EI units.
 
     In Tuesday’s Science Times, Colin Stark provided an answer to the reader query “When tectonic plates collide, what determines which one winds up on top?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/science/earthquakes-tectonic-plates-collisions-subduction.html?_r=0). Colin’s response to that question, motivated by the recent earthquakes in Nepal, was “The short answer is buoyancy” (i.e., of the lithosphere).
 
     Also on Tuesday, the Earth Institute faculty held a “retreat” at Arnold & Porter LLP, the law firm of incoming EI faculty chair Michael Gerrard. Lamont Campus participants who joined me at the meeting included Robin Bell, Peter deMenocal, Peter Kelemen, Art Lerner-Lam, Stephanie Phirman, Peter Schlosser, and Richard Seager, and Bob Chen from CIESIN. The daylong session was framed around three discussion themes: (1) Earth Institute grand challenges (led by Scott Barrett and Peter deMenocal), (2) Planning for the grand challenges and the future of EI (led by Mike Gerrard and Pat Kinney), and (3) Mechanisms for implementation (led by Peter Schlosser and Elke Weber).
 
     In today’s issue of Science is a lengthy news story by Eric Hand on plans by Robin Bell and her group, with support from the Moore Foundation and NSF, to produce high-resolution maps of the gravity field over the Ross Ice Shelf off Antarctica. The gravity field is sensitive to the bathymetry of the seafloor beneath the shelf, and in turn the bathymetry provides information on the circulation of warm ocean water and its affect on the overlying ice sheet.
 
     On Monday evening next week, Art Lerner-Lam will be a discussion leader in an event on “Climate and risk – Business and legal perspectives” sponsored by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development as part of their Deciding Factors: Climate Change series. The event, to be held in the Jerome Greene Performance Space in Manhattan, also features Mike Gerrard; Elke Weber, Director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions; and Jonathan Weiner, the Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism.
 
     In the meantime, may you all enjoy the late-spring weekend.
 
       Sean