Lamont scientists utilize a variety of observational and computational techniques to image and model the deep interior of the Earth, from crust to core.
The MGDS MediaBank contains high quality images, illustrations, animations and video clips that are organized into galleries.
Access cruise information and data collected during Ridge2000 funded projects.
Mutibeam Bathymetry data from the global Mid-Ocean Ridge with access to related data.
The bottom of the ocean just keeps getting better. Or at least more interesting to look at. In an ongoing project, mappers at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been gathering data from hundreds of research cruises and turning it all into accessible maps of the ocean floor with resolutions down to 25 meters.
The New Jersey shoreline that sea birds wandered during the last ice age is about 90 miles east of today’s beaches, tens of meters beneath the sea floor. As the ice melted, sea level gradually rose and flooded the coastal terrain, and sedimentation carried out its relentless burial of things past.
This summer, a group of scientists spent several weeks aboard the R/V Marcus G. Langseth looking into that past. Using sound waves, they collected data that will be used to build 3D images of the sediment beneath the ocean floor. They hope to be able to peel back layers of the 3D images to see how coastal landscapes responded to rising sea levels and hurricanes through history.
Lamont-Doherty scientist Timothy Crone is at sea off the Northwest U.S. coast, dropping sensors into the deep ocean as part of a major initiative to better understand oceans, climate and plate tectonics. You can watch a live video feed from the robotic vehicle ROPOS and see it deploy instruments and take samples from 4500 feet down on the seafloor.
“Drain the Ocean” will be aired Sunday, August 16, 2 p.m. on the National Geographic channel. The special put computer-generated imagery and digital mapping technology to imaginative use through showing what the oceans would look like if all their water was emptied through an imaginary drain. The result would be a landscape far more dramatic than anything on dry land, including a 40,000 mile-long mountain range, the world’s deepest canyon and widest plains, and bizarre, bioluminescent life forms
Ordinarily, losing almost all of one's instruments would be considered a severe setback to any scientist. But when Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, recently learned that two-thirds of the seismometers she placed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean were trapped more than 8,000 feet (2500 meters) underwater, it turned out to be an extremely good sign.
Marie Tharp, a pathbreaking oceanographic cartographer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, co-creator of the first global map of the ocean floor and co-discoverer of the central rift valley that runs through the Mid-Atlantic Ridge died Wednesday August 23 in Nyack Hospital. She was 86.
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The Ocean Floor | What We Know and How We Know It |
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Deep Time | The History of Our Planet Revealed |
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The Science Behind Aliens of the Deep | Part of the Public Lecture Series |
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Revealing the Deep | Science and Engineering in Deep Ocean Exploration |
