2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001
12/19/05
Researchers have discovered
that one of the few remaining populations of Asian
elephants in India is actually two genetically distinct
groups. This could have far-reaching implications
in conservation plans for the endangered elephants
as well as other species on the Subcontinent.
12/19/05
Nirupam Bajpai, director of
The Earth Institute's South Asia program, presented
four reports to the Prime Minister of India, following
a year of intensive assessment by Earth Institute
experts on drinking water, electricity, primary health,
and primary education.
12/13/05
More than 650 guests gathered
in Chicago at the Seventh Annual Sargent Shriver Awards
Dinner on December 1, 2005 to honor Jeffrey D. Sachs,
director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University,
for his leadership in the fight against extreme poverty.
12/06/05
More than 200 participants from nearly 150 corporations and other institutions from around the world met November 14 and 15 at Columbia University for the second session of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change (GROCC). With 2005 on pace to becoming the warmest year on record, as well as the most active for hurricanes, and with world leaders preparing for critical negotiations on climate policy in Montreal in December, the Earth's climate was on everyone's mind.
12/06/05
A pile of garbage from World War II and the Little Red Light House were two highlights of Hudson River trips made this fall by students in Barnard College's Environmental Science program. The trips, which allowed students from three Environmental Science classes to gain hands-on research experience on the Hudson this September and October, were funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
12/06/05
The Earth Institute and The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) have joined together to ensure that a rich, diverse faculty becomes a mainstay of research and education at Columbia University. The new diversity initiative represents another step in what has become one of Columbia’s
highest priorities: the integration of women and men from a range
of backgrounds into all aspects of academic life.
12/06/05
New Earth Institute center will provide
practical assistance to community groups working to improve and
develop their neighborhoods
On November 16, former New York City
mayor and Columbia professor David Dinkins joined members
of The Earth Institute in inaugurating a new, interdisciplinary
Urban Design Lab. The Earth Institute's newest center is intended
to make the resources of the University more readily available
to residents of the city.
12/06/05
Last spring, the Wealth & Giving Forum
convened a weekend-long retreat that inspired the group’s
members to contribute more than $2 million to help The Earth
Institute at Columbia University advance the fight against
malaria in Africa.
12/02/05
Scientists from The Earth Institute
will arrive in San Francisco this week to attend the fall
meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an annual
gathering of more than 11,000 researchers from around the
world who study the Earth and other planets.
12/01/05
The Soviet
Union conducted 130 underwater, atmospheric and
underground nuclear tests in a remote archipelago
above the Arctic Circle over a period of 35
years, according to a comprehensive study done by
scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and
the U.S. Geological Survey.
11/18/05
Forget flushingtoliets or running
faucets. In Koraro, Ethiopia, residents walk hours for
a gallon or two of precious water. As part of the Millennium
Villages Project, engineering expert Upmanu Lall is exploring
how to create water sources for this drought-plagued
village.
go to audio slideshow
11/11/05
Disposing of waste via landfills
increases health risks 30-fold, compared with using
waste-to-energy treatment — which generates
electricity by burning waste — for disposal.
This is according to a study conducted by a student
in the Masters in Public Health (MPH) program at
the Mailman School at Columbia University.
11/04/05
Answers to typical questions
about the Earth's energy imbalance and its
implications provided by James E. Hansen, director,
NASA's Goddard Insittute for Space Studies. Hansen
was lead author on a paper published by Science
on this topic.
11/04/05
In
October 2005, the Trustees of Columbia University
changed the name of the International Research
Institute for Climate Prediction to better
reflect the work of the Institute. By providing
practical advancements that enable better management
of climate related risks and opportunities in the
present, Columbia’s IRI creates solutions
that will help to increase adaptability to
long term climate change.
10/28/05
In a country that made headlines
for a brutal genocide that left an estimated 800,000
dead, Rwanda now counts itself among several African
nations battling with another devastating enemy:
AIDS. But a clever new project called "TRACnet" will
help deliver life-saving drugs to patients faster.
10/24/05
A new
study released this week in the online edition
of
Science suggests that tree diversity
in tropical forests plays a crucial role in determining
how much carbon these natural storehouses are
able to hold, as well as their ability to provide
other important ecosystem services such as preventing
erosion.
10/13/05
During live Q&A, expert
in natural disasters explains ways to mitigate damage
Is the worsening of hurricanes
due to global warming? And how can we reduce the
impact of natural disasters? The answer to these and
other questions came from the director of the Center
for Hazards and Risk Research during a "live
chat" sponsored by VIIP Virtual Forum on October
13, 2005.
10/10/05
Many scientists suspected poor
land use caused the Sahel droughts of the 1970s
and 1980s. But scientist Alessandra Giannini found
the more likely culprit was the global oceans.
view slideshow
10/07/05
For many
residents of New York City and upstate communities,
the Hudson River is such a constant presence that it
can sometimes fade into the background of daily life.
On Wednesday, October 12, however, Earth Institute
researchers will contribute to the efforts of volunteers
and students from Troy to Brooklyn in putting the Hudson
front-and-center by capturing a scientific "snapshot" of
the river's estuary.
10/06/05
Only in recent years have scientists
begun to unravel the causes of persistent droughts in
the west. Richard Seager, a senior scientist at the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, will visit the New York Academy of
Science on October 18 to discuss the history of drought
and its consequences.
10/01/05
In 2002, Christian Webersik spent
months on and off in war-torn Somalia, conducting interviews
with both the elite and the layperson for his research
on the link between armed conflict and natural resources.
Research areas like this are the realm of a new group
of emerging scientists who arrived at Columbia this September
as Earth Institute Fellows.
09/27/05
Projects like the Millennium
Villages Project are putting ecologists, particularly
agroforestry specialists, to critical use in combatting
hunger and poverty by helping entire villages to
have more robust crops and healthier soils.
09/24/05
The
Natural Disaster Hotspots report
released earlier this year showed that the U.S. Gulf
Coast is among the world's most at-risk regions in
terms of human mortality and economic loss due to
storms like Katrina and Rita.
08/30/05
Scientists
have ended a nine-year debate over whether the Earth's
inner core is undergoing changes that can be detected
on a human timescale. Their work, which appears in
the August 26 issue of the journal
Science, measured
differences in the time it took seismic waves generated by nearly
identical earthquakes up to 35 years apart to travel through the
Earth's inner core.
Watch an animation that describes this research.
(Flash required)
08/30/05
New databases give researchers a look into processes inside the Earth's mantle
“For
thirty years scientists have been
debating whether there is a layer
in the mantle that has remained
unchanged since the formation of
the Earth," said
Cornelia Class, Doherty Associate
Research Scientist. "The new on-line
databases made it possible for
the first time to reevaluate the
geochemical arguments."
08/30/05
Some of
the highest quality images ever taken of the Earth's
lower crust reveal that the upper and lower crust
form in two distinctly different ways.
08/29/05
The Millennium Development Goals are the
world's agreed-upon targets to eradicate the extreme poverty, hunger
and disease that kills millions of people each year in the poorest
parts of the world.
The Earth Institute's
nine MDG audio slideshows
examine the complex dimensions of extreme poverty, and explain why
the eight Millennium Development Goals are
a way for the international community to achieve a better world
in our lifetime.
08/29/05
There was little rest
this summer for students in Columbia’s
Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental
Science and Policy, who spent the last few months
sharpening their knowledge of management and
policy issues through the Workshop in Applied
Earth Systems Management. Fifty-eight Masters’ candidates
gathered in five project teams to design a detailed
operational plan for addressing important public
policy issues affecting the environment.
08/29/05
Using a computer model
she built herself, Debra Tillinger, an environmental
science major, came up with a prediction as to
how much better New York City’s sewage
system would function if plant-covered roofs
throughout the city slowed the flow of rainwater
to the sewers.
08/03/05
Report From the Field -- Part 5
Joe Spring returns from his
research trip to French Frigate Shoals with a
few lessons learned.
07/29/05
Through
programs such as a child nutrition program,
immunizations, community farming, and a
bank created and led by women, a group
of
Ghanaian
villages outside Accra are making
their way out of poverty and "will achieve the
Millennium Development Goals," said Jeffrey D.
Sachs during his visit there on July 10th.
07/25/05
Report From the Field -- Part 4
Joe Spring reports that a
significant amount of trash bottles, bottle
caps, lighters, and even a working can of Cheez
Whiz
has washed up on the shore of this remote
Pacific island. Where does it come from?
07/21/05
Researchers
Track Underwater Noise Generated by December 26 Earthquake
When the sea floor off
the coast of Sumatra split on the
morning of December 26, 2004, it
took days to measure the full extent
of the rupture. Recently, researchers
at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
analyzed recordings of the underwater sound produced
by the magnitude 9.3 earthquake, opening
new avenues in seismologic research.
Listen to the December 26th earthquake (mp3)
07/11/05
Gerard
Clark Bond, a respected and beloved geologist at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and resident of Pearl
River, New York passed away on Wednesday June 29. He
was 65.
"Gerard
was one of Lamont's legendary researchers," said
Michael Purdy, Director of Lamont-Doherty. "He was
a great geologist whose most recent work on variations
in solar radiation contributed to our fundamental understanding
of changes in the Earth's climate system. He will be
sorely missed by the scientific community, by Lamont
and, most of all, by his family.
07/08/05
Report From the Field -- Part 3
Joe
Spring reports from East Island,
a border world where animals of sea, sand and
sky collide.
07/06/05
Scientists
are fascinated by a dark, lake-like feature
recently observed on Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's
Cassini spacecraft captured a series of images
showing a marking, darker than anything else
around it.
06/29/05
You can tellit's summer
when the mercury hits 90, the trees at the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory finally leaf out, and the shuttle
bus is packed with new faces. It's June and the
summer interns have arrived on campus, bringing
with them an infectious enthusiasm for science
and a rapid-fire barrage of tough, probing questions.
06/17/05
Report From the Field
While visiting Sri Lanka to study the tsunami
damage, four Earth Institute Fellows find the reconstruction
processoffers many opportunities for advancing
the goals of sustainable development and improving the lives
of the poor beyond simply restoringpre-tsunami conditions.
06/16/05
In this hour-long interview with
journalists, Jeffrey D. Sachs
discusses opportunities for the July G-8 Summit and implications
for tackling poverty and disease in Africa and worldwide. "If
there were a time and way for the G-8 to put the world on a safer
course, this is surely it," says Sachs.
06/15/05
Report From the Field -- Part 6
Four Earth Institute Fellowsdoing research
in Sri Lanka found thatthe natural environment
seems to have withstood the direct force of the tsunami,
and the most significant challenges to natural resource management
may arise much later.
06/07/05
A vigorous outreach program in Ethiopia
to train, pay and deploy 25,000 young female health care workers
is under way. How much
impact will this program have in a country where life expectancy
is 48 years?
View audio slideshow
06/02/05
Senior officials and leading scientists
from nearly 100 businesses and business organizations, national
governments, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions
came together on May 11 and 12 for the first in a series of
meetings to discuss how to address the challenges posed by
climate change.
05/23/05
The Countess Moira
Charitable Foundation granteda $350,000 endowment to The
Earth Institute for projects that help put countries on
the path to sustainable development.
05/19/05
Buried far beneath the cattails and
blackbirds of marshes in the lower Hudson Valley isevidence
of a 500-year drought, the passing of the Little Ice Age, and
impacts of European settlers.
05/04/05
A new center to
investigate individual and group decision making under
climate uncertainty and environmental risk has been created
with a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant
of $5.9 million. The Center for Research on Environmental
Decisions (CRED), based at Columbia University,
celebrated its official launch in a ceremony at Low Library
on Wednesday, May 4.
05/03/05
New Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) plans first project in Ruiru, Kenya
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
has been awarded a five-year $2.4 million grant by the Volvo Foundation
to establish a new Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD).
The center, under the direction of Elliott Sclar, Professor of
Urban Planning and Public Affairs, will focus on the utilization
of land use and transportation planning to create physically and
socially sustainable cities in developing countries.
04/28/05
Using satellites, data from buoys and computer models to study the Earth's oceans, scientists have concluded that more energy is being absorbed from the Sun than is emitted back to space, throwing the Earth's energy "out of balance" and warming the planet.
04/27/05
On Saturday, April 30, approximately 40
girls in middle school and high school from the Lower East
Side will travel to Lamont-Doherty's sprawling green campus
in Palisades, New York, to meet with some of the nation’s
top researchers and learn about critical topics in science not
normally covered in the classroom.
04/26/05
Many scientists fight a never-ending battle
against dust in their laboratory. Lamont-Doherty researcher Gisela
Winckler, however, can’t get enough. Before you send her what’s
under your bed, though, she’s only interested in a very special
kind of dust the
kind that rains down on the Earth from outer space.
04/19/05
Scientists using a new method of dating
fossil coral reefs have uncovered evidence that sea level
is capable of changing by as much as 30 meters in just a
few thousand years more
quickly and more dramatically than previously believed. The study,
carried out by geochemists
at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, appears in the April 15
issue ofScience.
04/18/05
One of the world’s most populous countries,
China has reduced the number of people living in extreme
poverty by as much as 60 percent and is now a leader in global
trade and annual growth. Coupled with these successes, however,
are challenges that pose significant threats not only to
China’s
economic, political and social stability, but also to the
health and well-being of the international community.
04/11/05
Scientists have
long held the belief that the fracturing of the Earth's
brittle outer shell into faults along the deep ocean's mountainous
landscape occurs only during long periods when no magma has intruded.
Challenging this predominant theory, findings from a completed
study show how differences in mid-ocean ridge magma-induced activity
produce distinctly different types of ocean floor faulting.
04/07/05
New tracer demonstrates carbon cycle changes preceded thermohaline changes
Scientists from the Lamont
Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) have provided new evidence that ocean
circulation changes lagged behind, and were not the cause of, major
climate changes at the beginning and end of the last ice age, according
to a study published in the March 2005 issue of
Science magazine.
04/04/05
A Dollar a Day in Sauri, Kenya
For a closer look at life on "One Dollar a Day," please watch this video:
RealPlayer (8:05)
Quicktime (8:05)
For more about the Millennium Villages Project, visit the
Millenium Villages website.
Kenyan Village Serves as Test Case in Fight on Poverty
"Led by Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, the project aims to fight poverty in all its aspects from health and education to agriculture and energy in one focused area to prove that conditions for millions of people like Ms. Odera and her neighbors can be improved in just five years."
From The New York Times, April 5, 2005
04/01/05
The ADVANCE Program of The Earth Institute
at Columbia University has awarded its first Marie Tharp Fellowships
to three women scientists whose research includes studies of
southern hemisphere atmospheric circulation, thermochronoloogy
and tropical resources. The fellows will spend 1-3 months working
alongside Earth Institute research scientists, faculty and
post-doctoral students.
04/01/05
In an effort to inform the public of
the ever-greater demand on the world’s natural resources — costs
of which run into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars
annually — CERC, the New York Times Foundation and Nurture
New York's Nature hosted a week-long intensive program for
journalists, presenting tools to interpret and report on sometimes-conflicting
scientific information about leading environmental issues.
04/01/05
Since 1999 Christina Rumbaitis-del
Rio, an Earth Institute fellow, has been studying the ability
of forests to recover after a natural event, such as a forest
fire, and how salvage logging, a practice that clears felled
trees, affects the overall resilience of a coniferous forest.
03/29/05
s
Researchers from Columbia University and
The World Bank have published a report entitled, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis,” that presents a global view of disaster risks associated with some major natural hazards drought, floods, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides. The report identifies high-risk geographic regions so that development efforts can be better informed and designed to reduce disaster-related losses in the future.
03/25/05
Can local planners use data to prevent
disaster?
On Tuesday, March 29,
2005, The Center for International Earth Science Information Network
(CIESIN) at the Earth Institute at Columbia will launch a new web
portal providing comprehensive information on climate change in the
New York Metropolitan area.
03/08/05
GRUMP mapping project finds urban areas increasing in surprising ways
The majority of the world’s population will soon live in urban rather than rural areas. Adding a spatial dimension to population estimates, a new study finds that as much as three percentof the Earth’s land area has already been urbanized, which is double previous estimates. This new data collection, known as the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP), has provided the basis for a number of important insights not previously known. This project is led by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), part of the Earth Institute.
03/07/05
Jeffrey D. Sachs writes a realistic blueprint for worldwide economic success
"Extreme poverty can be ended, not
in the time of our grandchildren, but our time." Thus forecasts
Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute, whose twenty-five
years of experience observing the world from many vantage points
have helped him shed light on the most vital issues facing our
planet: the causes of poverty, the role of rich-country policies,
and the very real possibilities for a poverty-free future a
goal, he argues, we can reach in a mere 20 years.
03/01/05
Most people hike through forests, but
CERC post-doc Robin Sears likes to canoe through them. In South
America, parts of the Amazon rainforest can be flooded seasonally
with up to 40 feet of water. In her research, Sears stands
waste-deep in flooded farm fields studying growth and survival
rates of Calycophyllum spruceanum, a fast-growing tree used
locally as fuel and building material. Her research on tree
and seedling growth rates and survival helps farmers plan for
future yields and contributes to the understanding of its natural
history.
03/01/05
Michael J. Balick, whose research helped
to transform the field of ethnobotany into an internationally
recognized academic discipline, has received the 2004 AAAS
International Scientific Cooperation Award for his efforts
to promote scientific collaboration within the field of ethnobotany.
Balick is adjunct professor at Columbia's Department of Ecology,
Evolution and Environmental Biology and Director and Philecology
Curator of the Institute of Economic Botany at The New York
Botanical Garden.
02/25/05
A pilot study gathers baseline information on subway workers’ exposure Working in the subway
several hours each day, subway workers and transit police breathe
more subway air than the typical commuter. Subway air has been
shown to contain more steel dust than outdoor or other indoor
air in New York City. But do transit workers’ bodies harbor elevated
levels of these metals? And does this translate into a health
concern for the workers?
02/01/05
At the age
of 24, Peter Kelemen visited the Himalayas and found himself
looking at now-solidified outcrops of the Earth’s
mantle containing veins where lavas reacted with solid
rock during their ascent to volcanoes on the surface.
He asked himself, “How could lava have passed through
so much rock and not be fundamentally changed?”
02/10/05
Wax proves a perfect model of the Earth’s crust
Using a tub of wax, geophysicists from Cornell
and Columbia University have made a predictive modelfor one
of the most important and poorly understood features of plate
tectonics.This
research links wax models with genuine patterns
in the Earth’s crust for the first time.
watch movie of wax in action (Quicktime, 2:05)
02/08/05
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory experts form climate modeling group to track data
Using observations
and models, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientists learn
that all the major dry and wet events in the American West
in the last century and a half were forced by slowing varying
tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs).
01/26/05
Director James Cameron’s New IMAX Film Puts Columbia Scientist in the Deep Sea
James Cameron, who has won Academy
Awards for Titanic and The Terminator,has a passion for
deep-sea science that fueled his
most recent work, the science documentary "Aliens of the Deep,"
which is to be released in IMAX theatres across the country, and
features Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientist Maya Tolstoy.
01/24/05
Marine seismic research will play aninvaluable 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.
01/12/05
The new center, directed by the International
Research Institute for Climate Prediction's Stephen Connor,
a specialist in the geography of infectious diseases, will
facilitate improved knowledge and application of seasonal climate
forecasts in regions facing high incidences of climate-related
diseases such as malaria, dengue and cholera, with malaria
alone threatening more than 110 million people living in epidemic
prone regions in Africa.
01/07/05
A team
of experts from the Earth Institute and Hogan & Hartson LLP,
working pro bono, assisted São Tomé and Príncipe
in its year-long effort to develop and enact a new
international standard for transparency and control of oil
revenues. "Nothing will be hidden, nothing will be wasted," said
São Tomé and Príncipe President Fradique
de Menezes.
01/05/05
Columbia professor’s statistical tool to help in well-digging
Well diggers in Araihazar, Bangladesh
will soon be able to take advantage of a cell phone-based data
system, developed at the Earth Institute at Columbia University,
to target safe groundwater aquifers for installing new wells
that are not tainted with arsenic. Using a new needle-sampler
(also developed at the Earth Institute), they will be able
to test whether the water is safe during drilling and before
a well isinstalled.
01/05/05
Satellite images are helping to target
relief efforts in regions devastated by the Asian tsunamis
of December 26. Maps like the one here are based on vegetation
loss, which at this resolution "is the clearest indication of where
the damage is", says Christopher Small, a geophysicist at Columbia
University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.