Billy D’Andrea is trying to understand Easter Island’s climate history over the last few thousand years and how communities dealt with past climate change.
News and Events
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December 14, 2017
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December 11, 2017
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.
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December 08, 2017
As climate warms, the surface of the Greenland ice sheet is melting, and all that meltwater ends up in seasonal rivers that flow to the sea. At least that is what scientists have assumed until now. A new study shows that some of the meltwater is actually being soaked into porous subsurface ice and held there, at least temporarily.
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December 08, 2017
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.
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December 06, 2017Congress has opened portions of Alaska’s pristine wilderness to oil and gas development. What might that mean for the creatures living there?
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December 04, 2017
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.
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December 04, 2017
If each of us in the U.S. ate half as many burgers and steaks each week, according to a new study, there could be substantial effects on carbon emissions and the environment.
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December 04, 2017
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.
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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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