A multidisciplinary team of scientists undertook a 20-day research cruise on the Research Vessel Endeavor to map the effects of the Haitian earthquake offshore.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, drought, cyclones and other natural hazards have significant potential to affect human lives and society.
Historical data for I.G.Y. Calibration. The original is by H. Miller.
We mapped the surface trace of the fault rupture for about 5 km on the west bank of the Khunar River, through Balakot and into the Sarash Valley where it apparently ends.
LDEO surface processes (geomorphology & remote sensing) group web server, in order to disseminate our work to the geomorphology and hydrology research communities and beyond.
The mission of the Columbia Center for Hazards and Risk Research is to advance the predictive science of natural and environmental hazards and the integration of science with hazard ri
| Name | Title | Fields of interest | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Meredith Reitz | Postdoctoral Research Scientist | geomorphology, river deltas, river-tectonic interactions, landslides, natural hazards, sediment transport, sand dunes |
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Einat Lev | Lamont Associate Research Professor | Physical volcanology, lava flow, numerical modeling, analog experiments, natural hazards, volcanic eruptions, magma, fluid mechanics, UAVs, photogrammetry, aerial photography, planetary volcanism |
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Klaus H. Jacob | Special Research Scientist | seismology, engineering seismology, climate change adaptation, disaster risk management, loss modeling, quantitative hazard assessment and mapping |
A guide to wildfire experts at the Earth Institute.
Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has found that rising temperatures influence wildfires in the American West.
I had one last day installing seismometers with the team, then left for Mandalay. After a breakfast with colleagues, I had a free day to explore Mandalay Hill.
With the GPS done, I joined the seismologists installing 32 stations in Myanmar. We finished the preparations and then headed out to the field in three teams.
On the way back to Kale, we stopped at a Catholic church where one of the seismometers will be deployed. The seismic team is now in Nay Pyi Taw, the capital preparing for the seismic instrument deployment.
Our next two sites were Kalewa to the east and Tedim to the west. To get to Kalewa we followed the Myittha River past the Kabaw Fault to the site with view of a monastery. Tedim is a long and windy drive through the mountainous Chin Hills.
We drove 15 hours over two days to get to Kale, our new home base. Here, we managed to build a monument and install our first GPS station in only one day. Our homemade post-driver worked amazingly well.
There may be a significant earthquake hazard in the densely populated region along the IndoBurman subduction zone. Thus, we are in Myanmar, installing five GPSes to study it.
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?
Lamont experts are on-hand to answer media questions about hurricane physics, rapid intensification, emergency response, and more.
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.
Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call for a lot of people in New York City, including Adam Sobel, who’s spent more than two decades studying the physics of weather and climate. He spent a lot of time during and after the storm talking to the media about what was happening, and why. He says the intense public interest made clear to him the need to find ways to apply the esoteric physics of atmosphere and oceans so we can be better prepared for the next extreme event.
Natural disasters have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with associated costs of hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage. Providing timely warnings of damaging ground-shaking from earthquakes and the imminent arrival of tsunamis is an ongoing challenge. Networks of instruments developed in recent years by researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and elsewhere have improved our ability to provide those predictions for vulnerable populations. A new pilot program led by Lamont aims to make those warnings earlier and more accurate.
Powerful tropical cyclones like the super typhoon that lashed Taiwan with 150-mile-per-hour winds last week and then flooded parts of China are expected to become even stronger as the planet warms. That trend hasn’t become evident yet, but it will, scientists say.
A huge earthquake may be building beneath Bangladesh, the most densely populated nation on earth. Scientists say they have new evidence of increasing strain there, where two tectonic plates underlie the world’s largest river delta. They estimate that at least 140 million people in the region could be affected if the boundary ruptures; the destruction could come not only from the direct results of shaking, but changes in the courses of great rivers, and in the level of land already perilously close to sea level.
On a ledge just inside the lip of Chile’s Quizapu volcanic crater, Philipp Ruprecht was furiously digging a trench. Here at an elevation of 10,000 feet, a 1,000-foot plunge loomed just yards away, and wind was whipping dust off his shovel. But the volcanologist was excited. Ruprecht had just found this spot, topped with undisturbed wedding-cake layers of fine, black material that the crater had vomited from the deep earth some 84 years ago. Samples from the currently inactive site might shed light on its exceedingly violent behavior.
When the most recent eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano started last June, Melvin Sugimoto at first did not think much of it. Hawaii, where he has lived all his life, is made entirely of hardened lava, and Kilauea, perhaps the world’s most active volcano, has been adding more off and on for the last 300,000 years. “Lava is everywhere, but I never thought in a million years it would come through here,” said Sugimoto, who lives in the small town of Pahoa.
As Superstorm Sandy headed for New York City, Adam Sobel’s phone started ringing with calls from reporters, and it kept ringing as the subway tunnels filled with water, the storm passed, and the city started to clean up. The reporters wanted to understand the science behind the storm and what it meant for the future. Their questions and Sobel’s conversations with colleagues across Columbia University working on issues related to extreme weather inspired him to write “Storm Surge,” a 2014 book about Sandy that just won the American Meteorological Society’s Louis J. Battan Author’s Award.
The climate over the tropical Pacific is in an extreme state at the moment. That explains some of the extreme anomalies affecting the United States right now. It also gives us a window through which we can glimpse how even more dramatic and long-term climates of the distant past might have worked, and – in the most radical scenarios, unlikely but impossible to rule out entirely – how much more extreme future climate changes could occur.
After John Diebold, an enormously popular and influential marine scientist, died suddenly in summer 2010, friends and family resolved to erect a memorial to him.
During a long career at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Diebold had spent seven or so of his 66 years at sea on all the world’s oceans, and many more preparing for cruises and writing up results. Those who cared about him settled on a handmade bench, made of red oak carved to look like driftwood, joined with salvaged nautical-looking pieces of iron, all weighing about a ton.
A new study in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization shows how hot spots of lead contamination in soil can be pinpointed in order to safeguard children against drastic health effects. Researchers led by geochemist Alexander van Geen of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studied soil around two Peruvian mining towns, and found high lead concentrations contained in discrete pockets in certain neighborhoods, while other spots were not so dangerous.
For years before Hurricane Sandy charged ashore on Monday, researchers from the Earth Institute knew what was coming. In a rapidly urbanizing world, where hundreds of millions of people now live in low-lying coastal areas, those scientists have been urging policymakers to appreciate the threats posed by such natural disasters and find ways to make our cities more resilient.
For much of the last decade, Klaus Jacob warned of New York’s vulnerability to severe flooding in a major storm. Rising seas and more extreme weather from a warming climate could cripple the New York region, he told anyone willing to listen.
The evening view from across the East River tells a tale of two cities: downtown Manhattan mostly shut down, without power, subways and most services; uptown Manhattan brightly lit, subways running, businesses and neighborhoods climbing back to some kind of usual.
Steep mountains produce some of the biggest landslides on earth but in such rugged terrain who’s around to notice? These monster backcountry slides are now gaining attention from far-away scientists, aided by a global network of seismic stations, earth-orbiting satellites and the crowd-sourcing power of the internet.
Meteorologists can see a busy hurricane season brewing months ahead, but until now there has been no such crystal ball for tornadoes, which are much smaller and more volatile. This information gap took on new urgency after tornadoes in 2011 killed more than 550 people, more than in the previous 10 years combined, including a devastating outbreak in April that racked up $5 billion in insured losses..
The magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook central Virginia on Tuesday afternoon is one of the biggest earthquakes to hit the East Coast since 1897, and was comparable in strength to a quake on the New York-Canadian border in 1944, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was centered near Mineral, Va., about 38 miles northwest of Richmond, and in an area known for frequent though lesser quakes.
Researchers returning from a cruise some 250 miles off the coast of Oregon have reported seeing a volcanic eruption on the seafloor that they accurately forecast five years ago—the first successful prediction of an undersea eruption. The event took place at Axial Seamount, one of the most active and intensely studied undersea peaks in the world.
For all of its violent destruction, the earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, hardly scratched the surface of the island. But scientists now say they have found some of the best clues to understanding the quake under water.
After the recent great quakes that have swept away entire coastlines and cities in Japan, Haiti and Sumatra, scientists are now looking hard at the nation that may suffer the gravest threat of all: Bangladesh. A new documentary from the Earth Institute follows seismologists as they trace signs of deeply buried active faults, past movements of the earth, and sudden, catastrophic river-course changes.
The recent earthquake in Japan shifted the earth’s axis by half a foot. You may be wondering if that’s enough to change earth’s weather. No, not really, says Jerry McManus, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The largest recorded earthquake in Japan's history has triggered a series of events that have killed thousands, crushed and submerged cities, and left a financial toll from which it will take years for an already struggling economy to recover.
Northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut and environs are not necessarily where one would expect to explore the onetime extinction of much life on earth, and subsequent rise of dinosaurs. But it turns out to be a pretty good place to start. Underlying the exurbs are geological formations left by three giant episodes of volcanism starting around 200 million years ago, and intervening layers of sediments that built up in the interims between massive lava flows.
Each year, dozens of small, mostly harmless earthquakes quakes rattle the northeastern United States and southern Canada, and one quite active area runs along the shores of lakes Erie and Ontario, in western New York. In order to learn more about what generates these, and the possible threat of something bigger, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have installed a new seismometer at the West Valley Central School, southeast of Buffalo.
An earthquake with the following parameters has occurred:
Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 17:41:42 UTC, 13:41:42 EDT (1:42 PM in NY)
Location: 45.862 °N, 75.457 °W (Southern Ontario), approximately 53 KM (33 mi) NNE from Ottawa
Depth: 18 km (11.2 mi) set by location program
Magnitude 5.0
In nature, random signals often fall mysteriously in step. Fireflies flashing sporadically in early evening soon flash together, and the same harmonic behavior can be seen in chirping crickets, firing neurons, swinging clock pendulums and now, it turns out, rupturing earthquake faults.
This week U.S. and Haitian scientists will start a 20-day research cruise off Haiti to address urgent questions about the workings of the great Jan. 12 earthquake, and the possibility of continuing threats. They hope to gather sonar images, sediments and other evidence from the seafloor that might reveal hidden structures...
The earthquake that struck Haiti took place along what is called a strike-slip fault—a place where tectonic plates on each side of a fault line are moving horizontally in opposite directions, like hands rubbing together. When these plates lock together, stress builds; eventually they slip; and this produces shaking.
Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant Seen As Particular Risk
A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area much greater than formerly believed.
Marine seismic research will play an invaluable role in providing the same level of warning currently in the Pacific Ocean to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, including the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. In January 2005 the Bush Administration committed $37.5 million to expand the current global tsunami detection and warning systems.
