Lamont Weekly Report, September 15, 2017

     With all of the attention devoted to hurricanes last week, it might have been easy to overlook the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that occurred off the coast of Chiapas, Mexico, last Thursday night local time (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/world/americas/mexico-earthquake.html). Art Lerner-Lam was interviewed about the quake by Popular Science the next day (http://www.popsci.com/earthquake-mexico), and by Saturday the New York Post ran an article about the earthquake hazard in New York City with a quote from Klaus Jacob on the threat to the Indian Point nuclear power plant (http://nypost.com/2017/09/09/new-york-city-is-overdue-for-a-major-earthquake/).

     On Friday afternoon last week, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences threw a party for new graduate students, an event photographically archived by Bill Menke (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/users/menke/slides/public/17/gradstudents17/gradstudents17_0.html). The 20 new graduate students work in every research division at the Observatory as well as the American Museum of Natural History. Their last college or university and Lamont division are as follows:

Lloyd Anderson

Bowdoin College

Geochemistry

Daniel Babin

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Geochemistry

Daniel Blatter

University of California, San Diego

MGG

Christopher Carchedi

Brown University

MGG

Elizabeth Case

Cornell University

MGG

Miranda Cashman

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

BPE

Chistine Chesley

University of California, San Diego

MGG

Lucas Gloege

University of Minnesota, Duluth

Geochemistry

Chloe Gustafson

University of California, San Diego

MGG

Rebecca Herman

University of California, Berkeley

OCP

Tyler Janoski

Rutgers University

OCP

Matthew Johns

Stanford University

Geochemistry

Jonathan Lambert

Columbia University

BPE

Nathan Lenssen

Columbia University

OCP

Corey Lesk

McGill University

OCP

Nicholas O’Mara

Brown University

BPE

Sean Ridge

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Geochemistry

Aaron Stubblefield

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

SGT

Suki Wong

Imperial College London

OCP

Congyu Yu

Peking University

AMNH

 

     The R/V Langseth has been in Honolulu this week for minor repairs and for scheduled inspections by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the American Bureau of Shipping. In one week the ship will sail for Auckland, New Zealand, for the first of three NSF-supported seismic experiments off the New Zealand coast planned between October and March.

     On Monday, the annual Lamont Campus Excellence in Mentoring Award ceremony was held in the Monell Auditorium, and this year’s Excellence in Mentoring Award went to Arlene Fiore. Other nominees included Solange Duhamel, Joaquim Goes, David Goldberg, Jerry McManus, Richard Seager, Jason Smerdon, and Mingfang Ting. Photos of several who attended the reception that followed the ceremony have been posted by Bill Menke (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/users/menke/slides/public/17/MentoringAward17/MentoringAward17_8.html). To all of the nominees and particularly to Arlene, congratulations on your outstanding mentoring!

     On Monday and Tuesday, the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) team at Lamont hosted a joint meeting of the alliance’s two advisory committees, the IEDA Science Community Committee and the IEDA Technical Advisory Committee. Attending the meetings were a mix of Earth scientists, data management professionals, and cyberinfrastructure experts, as well as a couple of National Science Foundation program officers.

     On Tuesday, Lamont welcomed a visit by Columbia University Trustee Mark Gallogly and his wife, Lise Strickler. After hearing a brief introduction to the Observatory from me, Art Lerner-Lam, and Farhana Mather, Mark and Lise were given tours of the Lamont Core Repository by Mo Raymo and Nichole Anest, the Organic Geochemistry Laboratory by Billy D’Andrea and Lorelei Curtin, the Cosmogenic Dating and Noble Gas Laboratories by Mike Kaplan and Jennifer Lamp, and the IcePod Laboratory by Nick Frearson.

     On Wednesday, the Lamont Advisory Board met at the Columbia Club (otherwise known as the Penn Club) in Midtown. The focus of the meeting was on Lamont’s role in Columbia’s Capital Campaign and particularly the Climate Response theme of the campaign. Farhana Mather gave an overview of development efforts at Lamont and the Earth Institute and how these efforts dovetail with those of the campaign. Presentations on the report of the Climate Faculty Task Force in the areas of rising sea level, rising levels of carbon dioxide, and short-term climate variability and extreme events were given by Task Force members Mo Raymo, Dave Goldberg, and Adam Sobel, respectively.

     Ryan Abernathey and colleagues at Columbia, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Anaconda are to receive a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop “Pangeo: An Open Source Big Data Science Platform.” The Pangeo project will seek new ways to take advantage of the rapidly growing number and increasing size of climate simulations, or Earth system models (ESMs), and it addresses an important goal of Lamont’s Real-Time Earth initiative. A Marie Aronsohn story on the project was posted on our web site yesterday (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/pangeo-project-will-improve-access-climate-data).

     The fall issue of Columbia Magazine, which arrived in my mailbox this week, includes a 10-page cover article on Lamont’s work on the polar ice sheets. Robin Bell, Alexandra Boghosian, Winnie Chu, Indrani Das, Nick Frearson, Jonny Kingslake, Marco Tedesco, Kirsty Tinto, and Chris Zappa are quoted or mentioned in the text, and Robin, Nick, Winnie, and Marco appear in photos along with Chris Bertinato and Tej Dhakal. The back cover of the magazine features a quote from Peter Kelemen and an image of him examining carbonate veins in a block of mantle peridotite exposed in the Oman ophiolite.

     Several Lamont scientists were in news stories this week, including a set of articles posted on Tuesday. Adam Sobel and Suzana Camargo were quoted in a story in The Verge on the issue of attributing aspects of extreme weather and climate events to climate change (https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16295000/extreme-weather-climate-change-wildfires-heat-waves-hurricanes). Adam was also quoted in a Newsweek story (http://www.newsweek.com/climate-scientists-cannot-predict-how-severe-future-hurricanes-will-be-now-663246) on the challenge to predicting the severity of future hurricanes. And The Buffalo News carried a story on a two-day workshop held at the University of Buffalo on Monday and Tuesday this week on the stability of the Greenland ice sheet, with quotes from Joerg Schaefer, a member of the workshop organizing committee (http://buffalonews.com/2017/09/12/global-climate-scientists-u-b-tackle-greenland-melting/)

     This morning, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which had orbited Saturn since 2004, ended its mission by descending into Saturn’s atmosphere. With the spacecraft low on propellant, the end of the mission was designed to ensure that the probe, not sterilized before launch, did not inadvertently crash onto Titan or Enceladus, moons of Saturn likely to host important prebiotic compounds and possibly even habitable by surface or subsurface organisms (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/09/12/science/ap-us-sci-saturn-cassini-finale.html).

     This afternoon, a quarterly meeting of the Lamont Senior Staff will be held in the Monell Auditorium. The meeting, which will be open to all Observatory personnel, will offer an overview of the state of the Observatory and will include presentations on the budget, capital projects, and development efforts. Time will be set aside for questions from attendees.

     Later this afternoon, the fall season of the Earth Science Colloquium series will be launched with a seminar by Kevin Griffin. Kevin will be speaking on “The inhibition of plant respiration by sunlight and its effect on leaf, plant and ecosystem carbon recycling: Evidence from oxygen isotopes to eddy covariance.” I hope that you can come out of the sunlight to join me in his audience.

 

                                                   Sean