Along the walls of Oceanographer Canyon, fish dart in and out of colorful anemone gardens and sea creatures send up plumes of sand and mud as they burrow. Bill Ryan, an oceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, watched the scenes through the windows of a mini research submarine in 1978 as he became one of the few people to explore the seafloor canyons that President Obama has now designated a national monument.
North of Norway, the robots wait. From a laboratory on Svalbard, a team of researchers led by Christopher Zappa of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are sending at least two Manta UAVs over the Arctic Ocean. Between Svalbard and Greenland, the drones measure melting ice with every flight to help humans better understand climate change and its impact on the Arctic.
That dreaded “low battery” warning on your digital camera may soon become a thing of the past. Several groups are trying to engineer cameras that are solar-powered, no plugs necessary. Researchers at Columbia University have developed a novel design in which each of the camera's pixels can both collect light as an energy source and capture an image. The researchers are presenting their work next week at the International Conference on Computational Photography in Houston, Texas.
“There’s a lot of hype around this issue,” says Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University and director of its Water Center. But, he says, we’re in little danger of running out of water overall. One could conceive of a scenario in which we’ve used up all the freshwater locked in ice or aquifers.