For a third week in a row, Monday brought wintry weather that kept many close to home. That the campus opened and operated as usual was once again thanks to the extra efforts of our Buildings and Grounds team.
On Monday, Lamont welcomed Laura (Lori) Nunemann as the Business Manager for the Observatory’s newly organized Marine and Large Programs Division. Lori comes to Lamont after nine years at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where among other responsibilities she coordinated the construction on behalf of the National Science Foundation of the ice-capable R/V Sikuliaq. At Lamont, Lori will be working closely with our Marine Operations and IODP Science Support offices, as well as related programs.
On Thursday, Ben Cook, Jason Smerdon, and Toby Ault of Cornell University published a paper in the inaugural issue of Science Advances – the new online, open-access journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science – on future droughts in the southwest and central plains of North America. With an empirical drought reconstruction and soil moisture metrics from 17 general circulation models, the trio showed that drought conditions are likely to worsen in the second half of this century and will probably exceed even the driest conditions of the last millennium. A press release by Kevin Krajick (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/warming-pushes-western-us-toward-driest-period-1000-years), a press briefing arranged by AAAS, and an interview of Jason on National Public Radio’s Science Friday the next day (http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/02/13/2015/are-decades-long-megadroughts-on-the-horizon.html) helped to fuel broad media coverage of the work, including stories on the major television networks and articles in The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/todays-drought-in-the-west-is-nothing-compared-to-what-may-be-coming/2015/02/12/0041646a-b2d9-11e4-854b-a38d13486ba1_story.html) and Forbes magazine (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/02/12/climate-change-will-probably-force-me-to-move/).
Other Lamont scientists were also in the news this week. Maya Tolstoy’s article last week in Geophysical Research Letters on connections among mid-ocean ridge volcanism, changes in ocean loading, and variations in Earth’s orbital parameters was featured on the NSF website (http://www.nsf.gov/) and in stories carried by National Geographic (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150207-volcano-eruption-ridge-milankovitch-ocean-earth-science/) and others. The lead article in Tuesday’s Science Times described the CarbFix project to sequester carbon dioxide in subsurface basalt in Iceland and quoted Juerg Matter and visiting graduate student Sandra Snaebjörnsdóttir (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/science/burying-a-mountain-of-co2.html?_r=0). An article Wednesday in The Japan Times on the relation between climate change and human conflict cites Mark Cane on the role of drought in the Syrian civil war (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/02/11/world/science-health-world/is-climate-change-fuelling-war/#.VOD6o8bC8os).
On Thursday and Friday, I visited the University of Texas, Austin, to give lectures at the Department of Geological Sciences and the Institute for Geophysics, both part of the Jackson School of Geosciences. Over those two days I met with large numbers of faculty and students, including Jackson School Dean Sharon Mosher; UTIG Director Terry Quinn; faculty members Mark Cloos, Ian Dalziel, Steve Grand, Marc Hesse, John Lassiter, Danny Stockli, and Clark Wilson; UTIG researchers Jamie Austin, Cliff Frohlich, John Goff, Sean Gulick, Jack Holt, Joe Levy, Yosio Nakamura, Harm Van Avendonk, and Duncan Young; postdoctoral scientists Nick Dygert and Hejun Zhu; graduate students Emily Hernandez Goldstein (Steve’s daughter) and Romy Hanna; and Center for Space Research scientists Srinivas Bettadpur, John Ries, Ryan Russell, Bob Schutz, and Byron Tapley. UT has an impressive breadth of researchers at all levels.
This afternoon, Ge Jin successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on the topic of “Surface-wave analysis and its application to determining crustal and mantle structure beneath regional arrays.” Congratulations, Dr. Jin!
This afternoon also marked the 20th Annual W. S. Jardetzky Lecture by seismologist and geodesist Roger Bilham. A Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Roger spent many of the formative years of his career on the Lamont staff. From 1975 to 1986 he held the positions of Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist, and Doherty Senior Scientist. A video of Roger’s lecture, on "The southern edge of the Eurasian plate: A fatal blend of earthquakes and corruption," will be posted on the Lamont web site (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/video) for any who missed the talk.
Next Tuesday, 17 February, there will be a presentation to the Lamont community on the recently released decadal survey for the ocean sciences. Requested by the National Science Foundation and entitled Sea Change: 2015-2025 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences, this report from the National Academies outlines priorities for oceanographic research and facilities for the next 10 years (http://nas-sites.org/dsos2015/). Don Forsyth, a member of the report's authoring committee and the James L. Manning Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, will give an overview of the report and answer questions from the audience. Susan Roberts, Director of the Ocean Studies Board, will also attend the briefing. I hope that you will be able to join me for this important and informative presentation, to begin at 10 am in Monell Auditorium.
The following week, on 24-25 February, an external committee will visit Columbia University and Lamont to review the Earth Institute, as part of a university review of EI being led by Mike Purdy. The three members of the external review committee are Christopher Boone, Dean and Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University; George Philander, the Knox Taylor Professor of Geoscience at Princeton University; and Maria Zuber, the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Vice President for Research at MIT. The committee’s visit to the Lamont Campus on Wednesday morning, 25 February, will provide an opportunity to showcase the Observatory’s role within EI as well as some of the many programs in research and education in which our campus is involved.
Sean