Cousteau's Shoulders

We are a group of students, technicians, researchers, friends, and collaborators working in the Paleoclimate research groups of Maureen Raymo, Peter deMenocal, Brad Linsley, Billy D'Andrea, and Pratigya Polissar at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

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Secrets of a Successful Post-doc

Dining under the super moon recently, the conversation between two SWS (senior woman scientists) turned to the topic of how best to advise junior scientists embarking on a two-year post-doctoral fellowship.  Here is our recipe for success: a) get your thesis papers submitted….on your own time; b) get your project off the ground quickly with an eye toward writing up new material by end of first year; and c) write/submit an NSF (or like) proposal in first year.  If these tasks are accomplished, the second year will likely be even more productive and you will be strongly positioned in a cut-throat job market.  If you are contemplating children, pay close attention to your benefits and the timing of allowed parental leaves.  For instance, if you start employment at Columbia with a one-month-old you may have little recourse to stop your 2-yr employment clock.

Here is a link to an AGU webinar on same topic.

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URBINO SUMMER SCHOOL IN PALEOCLIMATOLOGY - 2014

Hope to see some Lamont students there!  Peter, Barbel, Mo will all be lecturing this year....

U.S. Graduate Student Scholarships for the Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology (USSP) The 11th Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology (9-24 July 2014; http://www.urbinossp.it/) will provide graduate students with an intensive program on reconstructing the history and dynamics of paleoclimate through an integrated series of lectures, investigations, case studies, and field and laboratory analyses. To promote U.S. graduate student participation in this international experience, the NSF Geoscience Divisions and the Office of International Science and Engineering are funding ten scholarships to cover U.S. carrier airfare, stipend, and course expenses (including lodging). Interested students in U.S. graduate programs should email a pdf file comprised of a one-page CV and one-page statement on how the USSP would benefit their professional development as a researcher and educator to [email protected]. In addition, students should request their primary adviser to email a recommendation letter directly to the above email address. Members of historically underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. Deadline for receipt of application materials, including recommendation letters, is 15 April 2014.

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Looks like a good Workshop!

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The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes

President Obama's Science and Technology Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, explains the polar vortex in 2 minutes—and why climate change makes extreme weather more likely going forward. Learn more at http://wh.gov/climate-change. January 8, 2014.

Holdren's Polar Vortex Video

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Great little video about the new IODP - perfect for friends and family! :)

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More photographs from the 1960's when the crew of the R/V Vema attempted to salvage a bent coring pipe. 

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Geomorphological features from fossil shorelines (on left) compared to modern analogues (on right). Photos taken from the 2013 LDEO field expedition to Cape Range and Red Bluff, western Australia. 

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Fossil coral (Goniastrea) from 120,000 years ago (MIS 5e) that got overturned in a storm surge and subsequently buried by marine sediment.  Picture from field expedition to Lake Macleod, Western Australia, November 2013.

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Deploying the multicorer at sea

[ofools-deactivated20151107]

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SCIENTISTS 1: PIRATES 0

In April-May, 2001, just months before 9/11, a team of scientists led by Gerald Ganssen and I sailed aboard the Dutch-flagged R/V Pelagia from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Port Said, Egypt on the penultimate leg of a scientific circumnavigation of the African continent. This cruise sailed along the pirate-infested waters of the Somali coasts and the Gulf of Aden. With the vigilance of our captain and crew we safely navigated these waters and collected some new, extremely valuable, sediment cores and surface plankton tow and water samples from this geopolitically challenging region. 

core locations

Pirate probability density function

One of these cores, P178-15P, was taken from a perched basin in the Tadjoura Trench from a site cored long ago (in 1947!) by the Swedish ship Albatross. Finding this site was a challenge as the position was only approximate (pre-GPS!), so we used the PDR depth finder to zero in on the known 869m depth location.

Jess Tierney came to Lamont in 2011 as a NOAA post-doc to work up the plant-wax biomolecular record for this core, specifically extracting the plant waxes from these sediments as fatty acid methyl esters; FAMEs) and analyzing their hydrogen isotopic composition by GC-IRMS in our new stable isotope mass spectrometry facility. The leaf wax D/H composition (δDwax) is a powerful proxy for regional aridity, as the plants record precipitation/evaporation balance and changes in regional convection.

The results were surprising in many ways. The amplitude of the D/H excursions over this 40 ka long record was remarkably large, reaching nearly 40-50 per mil. Also, because the sedimentation rate for this core was so high (32 cm/ka), it offers a high-fidelity and continuous record of the hydroclimate shifts in the region. To our surprise, the onset and termination of the African Humid Period (roughly 12-5 ka BP) were really abrupt, with each transition completed within a couple of centuries. It’s sobering to think that climate changes this large can occur so swiftly. As discussed in the Tierney and deMenocal (2013) Science paper, a similar history is found in sediment cores from East African Lakes, Turkana, Challa, and Tanganyika.

Tierney, J.E., deMenocal, P.B., Abrupt shifts in Horn of Africa hydroclimate since the Last Glacial Maximum. Science (2013). Tierney.deMenocal.2013.pdf

Source: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/site/Research/Research.html

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2014 Climate Models Calendar

Presenting the only calendar on Earth that shares the planet's hottest climate science and the...

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How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

Evidence from the final research vessel to brave the treacherous waters off the coast of Africa in 2001 may have just turned the tables on the accepted scientific view of howand how quicklythe Sahara became a desert.

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Watch the northern hemisphere ice sheets wax and wane over the last 400,000 years.....really, it's mesmerizing.   The animation is from the model runs in our recent paper "Insolation-driven 100,000-year glacial cycles and hysteresis of ice-sheet volume" by Ayako Abe-Ouchi et al.

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rough weather in the western tropical Pacific - Angel