News
The Earth Institute is a remarkable place. I’ve been working here for more than 10 years and it is truly a place where you learn something new everyday. That’s entirely because of the people who make up this organization and their underlying dedication to helping solve some of the most complex issues going on. But who are all these people?
Altogether there are more than 1,500 people affiliated with the Earth Institute ranging from scientists, faculty, staff, and students of all levels. Not to mention the hundreds who have passed through here and continue to work with us. With that,…
For 10 years, central Chile has been gripped by unrelenting drought. With 30% less rainfall than normal, verdant landscapes have withered, reservoirs are low, and more than 100,000 farm animals have died. The dry spell has lasted so long that researchers are calling it a “megadrought,” rivaling dry stretches centuries ago. It’s not so different from the decade-long drought that California, some 8000 kilometers away, endured until this year.
By analyzing tree ring records, scientists have now found evidence that such tandem droughts are more than a coincidence: They are surprisingly common…
The year is 150 CE. It’s a humid summer day in Muyil, a coastal Mayan settlement nestled in a lush wetland on the Yucatan Peninsula. A salty breeze blows in from the gulf, rippling the turquoise surface of a nearby lagoon. Soon, the sky darkens. Rain churns the water, turning it dark and murky with stirred-up sediment. When the hurricane hits, it strips leaves off the mangroves lining the lagoon’s sandy banks. Beneath the tumultuous waves, some drift gently downward into the belly of the sinkhole at its center.
Nearly two millennia later, a team of paleoclimatologists have used sediment…
Europe’s Great Famine of 1315–1317 is considered one of the worst population collapses in the continent’s history. Historical records tell of unrelenting rain accompanied by mass crop failure, skyrocketing food prices, and even instances of cannibalism. These written records strongly suggest Europe’s Great Famine was caused by several years of devastating floods that began in 1314, but they can’t tell us how this flooding compares to historic averages, or its full geographical extent.
Now, new research using tree ring records confirms the historical data, showing the years of the Great…
About 400 million people could be at risk for flooding by the end of the century should the Greenland ice shelf continue to melt at its current pace, according to a new study.
The ice shelf, one of Earth's largest, is widely considered to be the largest annual contributor of water into the ocean, and it's expected to continue to be a major contributor to global sea-level rise in the future, according to the study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday. Read More
The 2019 Fall AGU meeting is next week and there will be many presentations from our PaleoDynamics Group, affiliated colleagues, and collaborators. Below is a chronological list of all our activities.
In addition to the individual presentations, Smerdon and Ed Cook will also be convening the Climate of the Common Era session with co-coveners Kevin Anchukaitis and Kim Cobb. This will be the 10th anniversary of the session and also mark the last time that the current group of conveners will convene the session. Several retrospective talks will kick off the…
The way that plants and trees respond to a warming climate and increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 has a significant impact on how they use water.
But will this leave more or less freshwater available for societies to use? That millions of people suffer from life-threatening water stresses in the current climate tells us that the answer to this question really matters.
Our new study, published in Nature Geoscience, attempts to shed light on this complicated picture.
Justin Mankin, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Paleodynamics Lab, has published a paper in Nature Geosciences on the role of plants in future freshwater availability. Plants are expected to generate more global-scale runoff under increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by reducing evapotranspiration. Recent studies using Earth System Models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project ostensibly reaffirm this result, further suggesting that plants will ameliorate the dire reductions in water availability projected by other studies. Justin's work complicates…
The amount of greenhouse gases being emitted into Earth's atmosphere has reached such a high level that it will take major changes around the world to mitigate the effects on climate change, experts say.
Greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, which trap the sun's heat, are the "most significant driver of observed climate change since the mid-20th century," according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Read More
With experts warning that the global climate crisis is becoming more and more dire, scientists and environmental activists say they are turning to the public to help effect change before it's too late.
The planet is emitting nine gigatons of carbon every year, and that amount increases annually, Jason Smerdon, a climate scientists for Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, told ABC News. By other estimates, the amount could be more than 30 gigatons a year. Read More
Note: The estimates for carbon emissions in the above article are different because…
Sloan Coats visited Lamont to give the OCP Seminar on September 20th. The title of his talk was A Story of Mega Droughts: New methods that highlight novel pathways for solid earth-climate coupling (see his talk abstract below). Sloan finished his PhD in the PaleoDynamics Lab in 2015 and is starting a tenure track faculty position at the University of Hawaii this fall (he was previously a Staff Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). Sloan's visit was an occasion to gather lab members and collaborators for an evening dinner. Hun Baek, Arianna…
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is now accepting applications for 2020 Lamont Postdoctoral Fellowships (deadline is November 11th, 2019). The Earth Institute is also accepting applications for 2020 Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellowships (deadline is October 30th, 2019). Our lab has mentored postdocs from both of these programs and we welcome your interest in pursuing research that you independently develop and pursue. Contact Prof. Jason Smerdon if you would like more information on working in our lab as a Lamont or EI postdoc.
When Jason Smerdon opened up a retirement account as a postdoctoral fellow a decade and a half ago, he gravitated toward socially responsible stock funds, despite the possibility of weaker returns. He figured his ideals were more important than investment performance.
Fast forward 15 years, and his investment philosophy is no longer as black and white. Read More
Multidecadal “megadroughts” were a notable feature of the climate of the American Southwest over the Common Era, yet we still lack a comprehensive theory for what caused these megadroughts and why they curiously only occurred before about 1600 CE. Nathan Steiger, a research scientist in the PaleoDynamics Lab, has published a paper using the Paleo Hydrodynamics Data Assimilation (PHYDA) product, in conjunction with radiative forcing estimates, to determine the causes of megadroughts in the American Southwest. He and coauthors report strong evidence that these droughts were driven…
Widespread summer droughts across the contiguous UnitedStates (pan-CONUS droughts) pose unique challenges because of their potential to strain multiple water resources simultaneously and the significant financial damages that they impose. For example, pan-CONUS droughts in 1988 and 2012 cost an estimated $40 and $30 billion, respectively. Hun Baek, a graduate student in the PaleoDynamics Lab, has studied these droughts in detail, first using atmospheric model simulations to study the causes of these droughts over the last ~150 years. In a new paper, Hun has now provided…