Lamont Weekly Report, June 8, 2012

The Columbia 25-year Club has two new members from the Lamont Campus, Marty Fleisher and Benno Blumenthal. Benno has been a mainstay in the IRI, and has implemented a widely used, sophisticated data management system and digital library. Marty has been front and center in the geochem labs, working with Bob Anderson. Congratulations to both!

 

We’ll recognize the employees with 10 years of service over the summer.

 

The big event this week was our Advisory Board meeting on Thursday. Barb Charbonnet and Board Chair Frank Gumper were able to schedule the meeting so that we could introduce Sean and Pam Solomon to our Board and some of our best supporters. Chuck Callan, one of our most engaged members, graciously hosted a welcoming cocktail party at his home in Grandview-on-Hudson. There will be more opportunities to welcome Sean and Pam to Lamont and Columbia going forward.

 

As this is being written, Langseth is in Astoria, offloading cores from her last cruise (Pratigya Polissar and Jean Lynch-Steiglitz co-chiefs) and preparing for Suzanne Carbotte’s cruise off the Cascadia margin. Geoff Abers is deploying seismometers on shore as part of this important on-shore/off-shore experiment. The Cascadia subduction zone was the source of a tsunami-generating megathrust quake in 1700 (dated by the tsunami arrival on the Japanese coast). Earlier events in Cascadia suggest the probability of recurrence to be about 10-15% over the next fifty years.

 

Hence the experiment….

 

I’ll re-read The Martian Chronicles this weekend. RIP Ray Bradbury.