Our planet was much in the news this week, from the continuing wildfires in Australia to earthquakes in Puerto Rico and Sunday’s eruption of Taal Volcano in the Philippines
On Monday, our web site gained a Kevin Krajick interview with Karl Coplan, a professor of environmental law at Pace University and author of Live Sustainably Now, a chronicle of his efforts to lower his personal carbon footprint recently published by Columbia University Press. Karl is also known to many at Lamont as the spouse of Robin Bell.
Mike Steckler continued his field blog from Bangladesh this week. Mike is leading a project to document geodetically the relative contributions of subsidence and sedimentation to surface elevation changes in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta region, and this week’s posting described the range of challenges to finding and reoccupying geodetic monument sites in that region.
Media stories about Lamont and our scientists over the past week included a Medill Reports story last Thursday about the symposium held in October to celebrate the life and science of Wally Broecker, with mention of comments by Mark Cane, Jerry McManus, Dorothy Peteet, Bill Ryan, Peter Schlosser, Maayan Yehudai, and alumni Michael Bender and Jean Lynch-Stieglitz. An Eos article last Friday described an effort led by Bärbel Hönisch to compile all available data on past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on a community website. Bärbel was also interviewed for the American Geophysical Union’s Third Pod from the Sun about her work on boron isotopes as a proxy for seawater pH and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Park Williams was quoted in a story Monday on Wired about the impact of Australian wildfires on climate and future wildfire risk. Peter de Menocal was quoted in a Bloomberg.com story Wednesday on the impact of climate change on investment decisions by major wealth management firms. And Dave Goldberg was quoted on the technology status of direct air capture of carbon dioxide in a National Public Radio story yesterday on a pledge by Microsoft to reduce its carbon emissions to a negative figure by 2030 and to remove from the environment all carbon dioxide that the firm has emitted since its founding by 2050.
This afternoon, starting at 4 pm in the lower level of the Monell lobby, we will celebrate the many scientific contributions of Doug Martinson, on the occasion of his retirement from the Lamont Research Faculty at the end of this month. There will be an open microphone for informal remarks about Doug, his research, and his teaching, and Arnold Gordon promises that there will be a number of "Doug stories.” I hope to see many of you there.
Sean