NASA followed last week’s Pluto flyby with an announcement this week of the discovery by the Kepler spacecraft of a super-Earth in an Earth-like orbit around a Sun-like star (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/science/space/kepler-data-reveals-what-might-be-best-goldilocks-planet-yet.html?_r=0). The planet (Kepler-452b) is 60% larger in diameter than Earth and has an orbital period of 385 days (but its mass is unknown). The star (Kepler-452) is in the same spectral class (G2) and has the same temperature as the Sun but is 20 percent brighter, 10 percent larger in diameter, and 6 billion years old. Who among us can imagine what Earth’s biota will be like in 1.5 billion years, not to mention what life, if present, might be like on a planet of that age with a force of gravity at the surface perhaps 60% or more greater than on Earth?
The R/V Langseth remained at SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx this week. On Tuesday, Sean Higgins and Paul Ljunggren once again hosted tours for visitors from Lamont and Columbia University. Visitors this week included Matt McCoy and Chris Pettinato from Mike Purdy’s office; and Bonnie Bonkowski, Tara Brant, Nicole deRoberts, Moira Dion, Solange Duhamel, Heather Ford, Mark Franklin, Yoni Goldsmith, Karen Hoffer, Allison Hooks, Kevin Jackson, Yvette Matos-Gooding, Sarah McGrath, Frank Nitsche, Helen Olivette, Sam Phelps, Pratigya Polissar, Kim Popendorf, David Porter, Sarah Raney, Maribel Respo, Katie Ross, Andres Salazar, Jason Swann, Kevin Uno, Stacey Vassallo, and Breana Warner from the Observatory.
The Langseth will begin her next cruise on Thursday of next week. The month-long expedition, cosponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of New Hampshire, will be a multi-beam and underway geophysical mapping survey designed to improve the definition of the seaward boundaries of the U.S. extended continental shelf under the guidelines of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Leading the project are James Gardner from the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at UNH and Margot Bohan from NOAA.
The new biogeoscience laboratories on the first floor of the Core Laboratory are now ready for use. Lenny Sullivan picked up the official Certificate of Occupancy from the Town of Orangeburg this Thursday, and a schedule has been developed to stage the several moves into the labs over the next several weeks.
Sonya Dyhrman is coauthor of a paper published online Monday by Nature Climate Change on the impact of ocean acidification on communities of phytoplankton, the freely floating algae, cyanobacteria, and other simple plants that form the base of the marine food web. With the use of experimental data on growth rates of phytoplankton taxa and a global marine ecosystem model, the group – led by Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT – showed that increasing ocean acidification will substantially alter the phytoplankton community structure. Moreover, acidification will have a greater impact on that structure than expected levels of ocean warming or reductions in nutrient supply.
Lamont’s web pages gained a recent blog entry by Adam Sobel on the extreme state of the current climate over the tropical Pacific (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/extreme-pacific-climate-now). Adam gives a nice tutorial on the current El Niño event, the possibility that it could rival or exceed the largest such events on record, its interaction with the currently strong Madden-Julian Oscillation, the implications of both phenomena for patterns of severe storms and precipitation, and the risk that the future might feature even more extreme climate patterns.
Richard Seager made the news this week, but for unusual reasons. In an interview on Monday, Democratic Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley alluded to the work of Richard, Mark Cane, Yochanan Kushnir, and their colleagues in arguing that climate change and long-term drought contributed to the political unrest that spawned a civil war and the growth of extremist groups in Syria. The Chairman of the Republican National Committee and conservative media scoffed at any link to climate change, but The Huffington Post and other media gave Richard an opportunity to place the implications of the scientific work in context (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/omalley-climate-change-syria_55ae7ed0e4b07af29d56793c).
Tuesday of next week marks an important event that foreshadows the end to this year’s Lamont Summer Intern Program: the Intern Symposium. At 1 pm that day in the Monell Auditorium, each of this year’s 26 interns will give a 1-minute oral presentation on the overall objectives of his or her summer research project. The interns will then present their findings in a two-hour poster session in the Comer Atrium. Everyone is welcome to attend both the oral and the poster sessions. Following the poster session, there will be a reception for the interns and their guests and mentors.
This afternoon, in the Comer Seminar Room, Sloan Coats will defend his Ph.D. thesis. His dissertation, supervised by Richard Seager and Jason Smerdon, is on a “Paleoclimate model–data comparison of hydroclimate over North America with a focus on megadroughts.”
In honor of the soon-to-be Dr. Coats, to forestall the impact of any impending megadrought, and to stimulate thinking about the possibilities for life on a super-Earth, a visit to TGIF this afternoon may be in order.
Sean