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.
News and Events
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December 04, 2017
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December 01, 2017
The story of human evolution is rooted in eastern Africa, where hominins, ancestral species directly related to humans, first appeared. A remote desert region around northwest Kenya’s Lake Turkana is the source of many important early human fossils and artifacts. This region is where Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory paleoecologist and geochemist Kevin Uno has been collecting fossils and sediments, searching for evidence about the climate, vegetation, animals, and water available to our ancestors millions of years ago. Among Uno’s goals is to understand the role of climate in human evolution.
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November 29, 2017
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.
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November 27, 2017
Lamont seismologist Lynn Sykes has been working for more than 50 years to halt the testing of nuclear weapons. His work, along with that of others, has demonstrated that clandestine underground tests can be detected and measured with seismic waves.
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November 21, 2017
Medicanes – hurricane-like storms in the Mediterranean – are rare but can be dangerous, as demonstrated by Medicane Numa’s path of destruction in Greece.
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November 21, 2017
Tightly consolidated sediments along a portion of the Cascadia Subduction Zone contribute to locking of the fault along the plate boundary for long intervals, major earthquakes, and the potential for a large tsunami.
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November 16, 2017
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.
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November 13, 2017
Concurrent with the announcement that human carbon emissions reached a new peak this year, Galen McKinley, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was interviewed about the difficulties of tracking the sources and destinations of carbon dioxide.
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November 06, 2017
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.
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November 03, 2017
Every four years Congress is provided with a state-of-the-art report on the impacts of climate change on the United States. The next National Climate Assessment is scheduled for 2018, but its scientific findings are scheduled to be published today. Here, two of its authors explain what to expect.
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November 01, 2017
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.
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October 31, 2017
The warmer, more acidic waters caused by climate change will affect the health of tiny marine organisms essential to the marine food web and important to the marine carbon cycle.
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October 31, 2017Perched on a cliff face in Israel’s Negev Desert, close to where the book of Genesis says the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were burned by divine fire, geochemists Yael Kiro and Steven Goldstein uncovered evidence of events even more ancient.
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October 30, 2017
During a show at the Hayden Planetarium, seismologist Ben Holtzman explains how he turns earthquake data into captivating sounds and visualizations.
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October 27, 2017
During a conference at Columbia University, scientists pinpointed areas where advances in fire prediction can be made within the next decade.
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