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Two new papers find that the line that divides the moist East and arid West is edging eastward due to climate change—and the implications for farming and other pursuits could be huge.

Sykes helped to establish plate tectonic theory in the 1960s. He is professor emeritus at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Lead poisoning has been in the news often over the last few years. Local high school students are helping Lamont scientists test lead exposure levels from lead-contaminated soils in New York City.

A generous donation of marine seismic technology equipment from CGG Inc. is enabling Lamont to advance its world-class ocean research capacities and opens the door to new areas of sub-seafloor exploration, including an expanded understanding of the undersea dynamics of earthquakes and tsunamis as well as climate science and impacts of sea level change.

Lamont’s Robin Bell is one of the world’s leading polar investigators and has been tracking ice for thirty years. She has coordinated ten expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland. And although she took her first expedition to Antarctica back in the 1980s, there is nothing routine about her approach.

Citizen scientists can gather data to help uncover how snow is changing over time.

On every continent and every ocean, Lamont researchers are studying climate, geology, natural hazards, ecology and more. Here is a list of projects in rough chronological order.

On January 31 at 1:00 p.m. EST, Lamont-Doherty’s Hugh Ducklow and his colleagues will use National Science Foundation social media to discuss their research on Antarctic ecology.

Researchers create first model for hurricane hazard assessment that is both open source and capable of accounting for climate change.

Rainfall changes caused by global warming will increase river flooding risks across the globe by the 2040s, says a new study. The study finds that the increases will be greatest in much of the United States, central Europe, Indonesia, and parts of India and Africa.

Climate scientists say that killer heat waves will become increasingly prevalent in many regions as climate warms. However, most projections leave out a major factor that could worsen things: humidity, which can greatly magnify the effects of heat alone. Now, a new global study projects that in coming decades the effects of high humidity in many areas will dramatically increase.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today announced his appointment of Alexander N. Halliday, a geochemistry professor at University of Oxford and vice president of the UK’s Royal Society, as the new Director of Columbia’s Earth Institute.

The coasts of Antarctica are ringed with ice shelves – large expanses of ice that float on the surrounding ocean and form the outermost extensions of the glaciers that cover the land behind them. A new study shows that even minor deterioration of ice shelves can instantaneously hasten the motion and loss of ice hundreds of miles landward.

Organic geochemist Pratigya Polissar is developing new tools to look at the history of plants and ecosystems on Earth over the past 20 million years.

A chronological guide to key talks and other events presented by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the American Geophysical Union 2017 meeting.

By night they glimmer, lighting up the surf of the Arabian Sea a phosphorescent blue. By day they appear as a thick, slimy, malodorous green blanket over the ocean. Nicknamed “sea sparkle” for their nocturnal appearance, these unusual plankton-like species are silently taking over the base of the regional food chain and threatening fisheries that sustain 150 million people. They are Noctiluca scintillans, a dinoflagellate that were all but unheard of in the Arabian Sea 20 years ago, but they are now demonstrating a unique capacity to survive, thrive, and force out diatoms, the planktonic species that traditionally support the Arabian Sea food web. Typically, diatoms are gobbled up by small sea animals, or zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by larger fish and sea creatures. Noctiluca has short-circuited this system.

Some towns and cities can get soaked even when the skies are dry—and these so-called sunny day floods are on the rise thanks to climate change.

Medicanes – hurricane-like storms in the Mediterranean – are rare but can be dangerous, as demonstrated by Medicane Numa’s path of destruction in Greece.

Two solar array farms in Orange County, New York, will be completed at the end of November, poised to provide power to and reduce the carbon footprint of the Lamont Campus.

Ozone pollution near Earth’s surface is one of the main ingredients of summertime smog. But it is not directly measurable from space, because the abundance of ozone higher in the atmosphere masks the near-surface. Now, researchers have devised a way to use satellite measurements of the precursor gases that contribute to ozone formation to predict when and where ozone will form.

A new study says that storms of intensities seen today, combined with a few meters increase in sea level, were enough to transport coastal boulders weighing hundreds of tons more than 100,000 year ago.

During a conference at Columbia University, scientists pinpointed areas where advances in fire prediction can be made within the next decade.

In October 2012, Sandy devastated large swaths of New York City with floods and fire. How well have we recovered? And will we be ready for the next big storm?

The undersea Corinth rift, in the Gulf of Corinth in central Greece, is one of the most seismically active areas in Europe. Starting this month, researchers will drill into it to discover the rift’s past and future.

In May 2017, the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory held a forum in New York City to discuss how new advances in climate science can inform investments in specific sectors of the global economy. The forum brought the world’s best scientists into a conversation with the world’s best investment professionals while setting aside the politics of climate change.

An ongoing study finds that 92 percent of private yards in Greenpoint may have unsafe levels of lead in their soil.

A team of scientists has found new evidence to bolster the idea that the Permian Extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago, was caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia.

Our Open House promises a day of science-filled fun.

Three scientists explain what they’re learning about the ocean’s changing conditions. These discoveries will contribute to the sustainable management and conservation of marine resources, helping to secure food for current and future generations.

Hoaxes have been calling Irma a Category 6 hurricane, but there’s no such thing. Could there be, in the future?

It’s too soon to say there’s a connection, but searching for the fingerprints of climate change shouldn’t take too long.

Plastic microbeads, common in soap, toothpaste and other consumer products, are flooding waters. A team from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is doing the first large-scale assessment of their impact on New York’s waterways.

Last week, just days before Central Park’s big Ivory Crush, a Lamont-Doherty geochemist and his colleague sawed off samples of the confiscated ivory for DNA testing and radiocarbon dating. Their results could determine where and when each elephant was killed—which could help catch the poachers responsible.

Scientists probing under the seafloor off Alaska have mapped a geologic structure that they say signals potential for a major tsunami in an area that normally would be considered benign.

Rising temperatures due to global warming will make it harder for many aircraft around the world to take off in coming decades, says a new study. During the hottest parts of the day, 10 to 30 percent of fully loaded planes may have to remove some fuel, cargo or passengers, or else wait for cooler hours to fly, the study concludes. The study, which is the first such global analysis, appears today in the journal Climatic Change.

Climate change could turn one of Africa’s driest regions wet, according to a new study. Scientists have found evidence in computer simulations for a possible abrupt change in the Sahel, a region long characterized by aridity and political instability. In the study, just published in the journal Earth System Dynamics, the authors detected a self-amplifying mechanism that they say might kick in once the planet’s average temperature goes beyond 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. This threshold, defined as the global danger limit by the Paris climate agreement, could be reached before the end of this century.

A warming climate is not just melting the Arctic’s sea ice; it is stirring the remaining ice faster, increasing the odds that ice-rafted pollution will foul a neighboring country’s waters, says a new study.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists has discovered that, contrary to general scientific belief, iron in nondissolved particle form can stimulate phytoplankton growth, and that the chemical form that particulate iron takes is critical to ocean photosynthesis.

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been around since the early 1900s. Originally used for military operations, they became more widely used after about 2010 when electronic technology got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, prices on cameras and sensors dropped, and battery power improved. Where once scientists could only observe earth from above by using manned aircraft or satellites, today they are expanding, developing and refining their research thanks to drones.

In November 1983, physical oceanographer Arnold Gordon was the Chief Scientist on the R/V Knorr, sailing around the southern tip of Africa, when the characteristics of his water samples came in terribly off. The temperature and the salinity of the water his team collected did not match the profile of the Southeast Atlantic Ocean. He had seen there characteristics before though, and soon, with more data, he confirmed that this clearer-blue “blob” of water they floated on top of was actually water from the Indian Ocean, coming in through a leak. This water, flowing from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic, became known as the “Agulhas leakage” and helped us understand how the ocean’s salt is circulated back into the North Atlantic Ocean.

The 2004 disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted the cataclysmic effects—superstorms, tornadoes and deep freezes— resulting from the impacts of climate change. In the movie, global warming had accelerated the melting of polar ice, which disrupted circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, triggering violent changes in the weather. Scientists pooh-poohed the dire scenarios in the movie, but affirmed that climate change could indeed affect ocean circulation—could it shut down the Gulf Stream?

Trump has aligned himself with the forces that deny scientific facts and economic realities. History will judge him harshly; our allies and most Americans already do. The law will need to play a major role in pushing back against the attempted dismantling of our environmental and health protections. —Michael B. Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Antarctica’s ice locks up enough fresh water to inundate coastal regions around the globe. And the ice is on the move: The continent’s vast glaciers are sliding toward the coast and out over the ocean, forming huge ice shelves that in some places are collapsing. Researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have spent the last two Antarctic summers flying over the massive Ross Ice Shelf, deploying a custom-made package of instruments to probe the ice. Their goal: to untangle the interactions between ice, ocean and land, to try and gauge the effects of warming climate.

Billy D’Andrea, a Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory paleoclimatologist and Center for Climate and Life Fellow is currently doing fieldwork in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. He’s interested in the natural factors that may have influenced the growth of northern agriculture and rise of violent Viking chieftains during the Iron Age, ca. 500 BC to 1100 AD.

For years, scientists have been warning of a so-called “hot spot” of accelerated sea-level rise along the northeastern U.S. coast. But accurately modeling this acceleration as well as variations in sea-level rise from one region to another has proven challenging.