Director's Weekly Reports

The first full week of spring has brought the welcome change that the Sun is once again in the sky for a majority of each day.

This week began with the loss of an hour’s sleep, as the onset of Daylight Savings Time was ushered in by the second Sunday in March.

The week ended with the sad news that Karl Turekian passed away this afternoon. A giant in geochemistry, Karl was both an alumnus (Ph.D., 1955) and a great friend of Columbia and Lamont. A note from his department chair at Yale directs Karl’s friends anc.....

In the first week following sequestration of the federal budget, we all await the sound of a second shoe hitting the floor above, but business otherwise proceeds as usual.

Tiffany Shaw learned this week that she is to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The NSF website states that “the…CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National....

The highlight of this week was the award of the Vetlesen Prize on Thursday evening to Jean Jouzel, of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, and Susan Solomon, of MIT. Attendance at the reception, dinner, and awards ceremony in the Low Library rotunda exceeded 230, a record for a Vetlesen Prize evening. Many from Lamont attended in their formal wear, including a number of graduate students and alumni. Also joining the occasion were....

The end of the week finds all of us witnessing the arrival of blizzard conditions, after the cancellation today of several Lamont seminars, meetings, and the Earth Science Colloquium. And this on a day when an ancestor to placental mammals, including Homo Sapiens,.....

The week began with the inauguration of our nation’s President for a second term. His inaugural address on Monday included a full paragraph worthy of sustained note by all of us, clearly focused as it was on those challenges addressed daily at Lamont and across the Earth Institute:

The week has been filled with good news.

On Monday, word came from the International Association for the Physical Sciences in the Ocean (IAPSO) that Arnold Gordon is to receive the association’s Prince Albert I Medal for 2013. The medal, named for prince of Monaco who was the founding president of the organization from which IAPSO evolved, is awarded once every two years. Only the seventh recipient of this medal, Arnold was cited “for his outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the general circulation of the ocean and especially for his studies of the Southern Ocean and inter-ocean exchange.” The medal will be awarded at the next IAPSO General Assembly, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in July...

A three-day workweek at the end of the calendar year finds many of us on travel or with families, a welcome respite before research and educational programs resume apace in the New Year. 

Today’s lead editorial in the Times is a well-reasoned call for President Obama to exercise greater leadership on the issue of climate change mitigation. The recommendation for further actions on limiting greenhouse gas emissions is welcome, even as most news from....

For many of us, the return from the AGU Fall Meeting and the end of fall semester classes remind us that another calendar year is drawing quickly to a close, a perception that no doubt fueled the pace of a particularly full week.

On Wednesday, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences announced that their Sara Langer Book Prize has been awarded to Jesse Farmer. This prize, awarded on the basis of a vote among the DEES graduate students, acknowledges outstanding contributions to graduate student life in the department and at Lamont. Our congratulations go to Jesse for this recognition, as do our thanks for his efforts that led to the award...