Lamont ended last week by hosting the third annual Seismology Student Workshop (http://eesc.columbia.edu/student-life/graduate-student-life/seismology-student-workshop/), a one-of-its-kind event run exclusively by and for graduate students. The organizers for this year's workshop, held last Thursday and Friday, were Celia Eddy, Helen Janiszewski, Kira Olsen, and Zach Eilon. Participants included 39 students from 15 different universities in nine different states. The workshop featured 21 talks on a wide range of topics. A short piece on the workshop will be featured on the weekly geoscience podcast Don't Panic Geocast (http://www.dontpanicgeocast.com/).
This week was one in which I spent much more time in Washington, D.C., than at Lamont. On Tuesday, I was at NASA Headquarters to defend the budget for the remaining portions of the MESSENGER mission. At least one planetary spacecraft mission now in development is overrunning its budget, and the agency is looking for possible sources of funding from other projects. I left the meeting with the impression that scientific and technical reasoning had prevailed.
On Wednesday through Friday, I chaired the 34th meeting of the MESSENGER Science Team, hosted by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. We are less than five weeks from the day when the spacecraft, having exhausted all of its propellant, will impact Mercury’s surface. The team is making the most of the latest observations from the spacecraft at these extraordinarily low altitudes.
Kyle Frischkorn has kept up his blog this week from the R/V l’Atalante in the South Pacific (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/research/blogs/wide-ocean-tiny-creatures). His latest entry waxes on his growing shipboard skills, including his facility with Tygon tubing and bowline knot tying. Understanding the microbial ecology of the tropical oceans is a journey of many steps.
From another ship, at somewhat more southerly latitudes, Frank Nitsche has started another blog (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/research/blogs/melting-glaciers-tracking-their-path). Frank is aboard the icebreaker R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer to study the vulnerability of East Antarctic ice streams to incursions by warm ocean water.
This afternoon, the Earth Science Colloquium resumes after the spring break. Today’s lecture will be given by tectonophysicist and geochronologist Peter Zeitler, the Iacocca Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Lehigh University (http://www.ees.lehigh.edu/EESpeople/zeitler.html). Peter will speak on “Feedbacks in orogenesis: A view from the Himalayan Syntaxes.” For those of us who have yet to finish our income taxes, some feedback on the deductibility of syntaxes may prove helpful. I hope that you will be able to attend.
Sean