Director's Weekly Reports

As summer settles in, field work activities intensify, undergraduate interns bring new life to the Campus and travel and vacation schedules make it even more difficult to schedule meetings and events.

I am sure there are many many more - but just in my conversations over the last couple of days, I discovered that this weekend there is a remarkable exodus of senior Lamonters to the oceans of the world.  Over this coming weekend, John Mutter and Suzanne Carbotte leave to join Langseth in Manzanillo, Mexico to lead a ground-breaking 3D seismic survey of the East Pacific Rise; Bob Anderson and Katherina Pahnke (newly appointed DARS effective July 1st - congratulations Katherina!) leave to join the Knorr in Bermuda for a GEOTRACES cruise, Ray Sambrotto leaves for Dutch Harbor Alaska to be Chief Scientist on the USCG Healey in the Bering Sea, and Mike Steckler and John Diebold
go to Turkey where they have chartered a Turkish research vessel to carry out high res seismics over the earthquake faults in the Marmara Sea.  (Not to mention the fact that Robin Bell and her group just returned from Greenland after successfully completing the first operational tests of the new Lamont airborne ice-penetrating radar mapping system.) As I say there is probably much more than this going on that I do not know about, but this is just what I heard about
directly in conversations through the week - an impressive and diverse level of activity.

Well, it is Friday the 13th and nothing terrible has happened yet... although yesterday my cell phone died, and earlier this week we did discover that carpenter ants are eating the Monell Building... but that seems unrelated to the failure of the phone system in that same building for half a day (which was caused by lightning).

I did an interview for Austrian National Public Radio (in English - so who will be able to understand it remains a mystery).

We received the disappointing news that yet another attempt at hiring a DARS-level glaciologist has been unsuccessful - so we will have to try again.

Our ship, the Langseth remains alongside the Scripps dock in San Diego completing final preparations  before sailing south to Manzanillo Mexico in a couple of weeks... Then, under the leadership of Suzanne Carbotte and John Mutter she will carry out the very first industry- quality three-dimensional survey of the volcanic plumbing system
beneath the East Pacific Rise.  Another first for Lamont...

In a speech in the Low Library earlier this week  Mayor Bloomberg  said: "Science in our city also puts New York on the cutting edge in the study of climate change. Columbia University's Earth Institute and its Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are world leaders in understanding and addressing global warming...

So it is nice that he knows our name!

The Commissioner of the New York State Dept of Environmental Conservation (Peter Grannis) and his Deputy Stu Gruskin spent most of the day here at Lamont, learning about the many NYS research activities in which we are involved. This was an extremely productive session that I believe will lead to substantially increased interactions. Other States around the nation, especially California and Florida, provide significant support for University-based research that has relevance to State interests - we must get New York into this same state of mind. The reality is that we do a tremendous amount of  research here at Lamont that is of fundamental importance to the healthy future of NYS.

It has been a very busy week with a particularly crazy schedule.  A day trip to DC on Wednesday to participate in an interagency discussion on the issue of marine mammals and sound in the ocean was followed by a successful Advisory Board Meeting on Thursday and Don Forsyth's Jardetzky lecture on Friday.

This Sunday is the last of Spring public lecture series - Kevin Griffin at 3pm in Monell, and on Monday I leave for San Diego to participate in the NSF Oversight Committee meeting for the Langseth.  She will be alongside at the Scripps Marine Facility so both the Committee and representatives from NSF will have an opportunity to go on board and review her status first hand.

The Earth Institute's External Review Board, commissioned by the Provost,  was in town at the beginning of the week, and they triggered a number of excellent discussions about the structure and future of the EI. It is always so enlightening to listen to perspectives from 'outside' - it was clear that the Board members perceived CU as
playing the major leadership role within US academia on matters pertaining to earth and environmental research and sustainable development. Very heartening.

Our own Michael Studinger is featured on the front page of the CU home page (one of the several photos they have cycling through) - looking like the quintessential field geophysicist surrounded by snow and ice and equipment boxes and earnestly recording observations in a field note book! I think I need to enact a new policy requiring large and legible Lamont logos on all our equipment boxes so when photos like this are taken we are guaranteed  visibility. (There is also a picture in the sequence taken at our Open House.)

Last Sunday we held a successful Alumni Association Board Meeting and lunch, along with a several of the Observatory's special friends, before Greg Mountain's great lecture at the second Spring Public lecture event - again to a capacity crowd in the Monell Auditorium. I had to leave early from the reception to get down to Newark airport in time to catch a plane to Houston with Dave Goldberg, rolling in to College Station substantially after midnight. So Monday was spent talking with the TAMU folks and with Ocean Leadership about how to keep the Ocean Drilling Program thriving and successful, through these difficult times of rocketing fuel costs and decreasing NSF support. After losing Tuesday to the return trip from Texas, and Wednesday to day-long interview sessions with a candidate for our new Academic Affairs and Diversity position, and Thursday morning to a very educational visit to the Liberty Science Center (to talk about a possible MoU), Friday arrived  - the pinnacle of which was the annual budget meeting with Provost Brinkley - always a positive joy.

Langseth arrived in port in Costa Rica this week - at the end of her first two legs of science operations for Steve Holbrook - which were by all accounts highly successful - absolutely fabulous data from the 8 km long streamer.

Last Sunday was the first in this year's series of Spring Public Lectures. Terry Plank was the speaker and the Monell auditorium was absolutely packed on a beautiful sunny afternoon. As you know last season we started charging a $5 entry fee and requesting advance bookings in order to try to reduce the difficult and embarrassing over flow crowds that we had experienced - but still we are experiencing getting capacity crowds - which of course is absolutely wonderful!  
And Terry's talk was fabulous - a very tough subject - the role of the earth's interior in the global water cycle - but she made it fun and exciting, up to and including spraying the Director with an effervescing soda bottle.

We hosted the editor of Columbia magazine and the CU Exec VP for Communications for separate visits this week, so we are certainly up-to-speed on all things related to the CU publicity machine!

We started the first round of interviews for applicants for the new position in the Director's Office - Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Diversity; and we made significant progress with decisions regarding this year's Post Doc Fellows program. So far we have made three offers - two were accepted and one declined and I am working, as we speak, on making one more offer.

After being out of the office last week I was playing catchup through Wednesday, when I had to go back down to DC.  The reason was to participate in a roundtable at NSF - tasked with defining research priorities in sustainable development. This was led by the Earth Institute - in particular by John Mutter and Jeff Sachs - but the attendees were (by design) predominantly non-CU, including luminaries like Bill Clark from Harvard and Steve Schneider from Stanford. The  
goal was to make the case that at the heart of sustainable development is a set of hard-core researchable basic research questions.  There was superb discussion at a very high level - but the determination of success will depend on how good a job we can do of writing up the report - and there is a short fuse on this because to have maximum impact we want to get the report into the system prior to a high-level retreat of NSF upper management scheduled for April.