This blog post was authored by 2024 Sabin Center Summer Intern, Arpana Giritharan, with input and supervision from Johanna Lovecchio, Director of Program Design for Climate Action and Adjunct Professor at Columbia Climate School, and Romany Webb, Deputy Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

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 Here are two pictures of an Echinocorys sulcatus (Goldfuss, 1826) echinoderm fossil found in Haidhof near Ernstbrunn Austria. The fossil dates to the Paleocene Epoch. Fossil was on display at the Natural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches ...

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The new ELI this week is 'Mapping "structures" on the playing field An exercise in measuring strike and dip.'

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Globally, glaciers are receding, one of the most visual and striking pieces of evidence of the way in which climate change is affecting our planet. The evidence is clear, both in satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and repeat glacier photography.

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I've written here before about Donald Glut's The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence. That book introduced me to a lot of artists I'd never heard of. The Dinosaur Renaissance was named two months before I was born, so I grew up with a mix of old school paleoart from the 1960s and before, and newer restorations by the likes of Bob Bakker, Greg Paul, William Stout, and -- fatefully -- Mark Hallett. Among the older artists that I first encountered in The New Dinosaur Dictionary was Neave Parker. Parker was active in the middle of the 20th century, painting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals for the British Natural History Museum, the Illustrated London News, and books by Edwin Colbert and W.E. Swinton (see this page at the old Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, and this almost comically ungenerous piece at the NHMUK).

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Recurring storms produced destructive flooding in the country's southwest and along its eastern coast. Read More......

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The pending Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement settles Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe claims to the Upper Colorado River Basin in Arizona. To do so, Arizona's 50,000 AF entitlement of Upper Colorado River Basin water will be allocated.

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 Here are some illustrations of the brachiopod fossil Productella spinulicosta (Hall, 1867). The fossil was found in the Marcellus and Hamilton beds at Erie County, New York, USA. The fossil dates to the Devonian Period. They were published in Am...

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Cannibalistic Comb JelliesThis festive lantern looking lovely belongs to a group of invertebrates known as comb jellies.Comb jellies are named for their unique plates of giant fused cilia, or combs, which run in eight rows up and down the length of t...

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If each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality.

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By now I imagine that almost everyone reading this is aware that I have a new book out, but if you somehow did not, then here's a chance to catch up and learn a bit more about it (and hopefully I can entice you to buy a copy). The title, as is rather given away above, is Uncovering Dinosaur Behaviour and it's out with Princeton University Press today, though copies have been circulating for a while at a few events and I know it's been sold at the Smithsonian too.

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Annual fires contributed to hazy skies over northern Pakistan and India, causing schools in some areas to close. Read More......

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Flores is a treasure box. It is one of the Lesser Sunda islands of Indonesia, and island arcs stretching for over 1000 kilometers east of Java. The name 'Flores' is Portuguese in origin. It refers to flowers, and specifically the red-flowered fla...

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This version of the Colorado River graph, courtesy of Jack Schmidt, more clearly illustrates the narrative of the talk I'm giving later this week:

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Last month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a report on a relatively new field of research - atmospheric methane removal. Addressing methane is critically important in addressing climate change - methane is the second largest contributor to human-driven warming after carbon dioxide. Although the concentration of methane is much lower than carbon dioxide and remains in the atmosphere for less time, a ton of methane has 80 times the heat trapping potential of a ton of carbon dioxide over a 20 year period. As the NASEM report highlights, "rapid and sustained reductions in anthropogenic methane emissions are critical to limit warming in future decades." However, rising human-driven methane emissions in recent years, coupled with concern about the risk of rising natural emissions in a warming world, have increased interest in exploring the feasibility of removing methane already in the atmosphere. This report represents a key milestone in the evaluation of whether atmospheric methane removal will be a viable and socially acceptable additional tool to help fight climate change.

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At Columbia Climate School's Signature Speaker Series, Hans Bruyninckx, former executive director of the European Environmental Agency, discussed the European Green Deal....

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 This picture is of an Aulacophyllum conigerum (Davis, 1877) coral fossil. It was found in the Beechwood Limestone of Charlestown, Indiana USA. It dates to the Middle Devonian Period.This coral fossil was once part of the collection of southern In...

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Researchers have developed a new way to measure near-shore bathymetry using satellite observations alone. Read More......

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Dog?In a scan of The Atlantic homepage recently, I came across Are You a Platonist or an Aristotelian? I was especially intrigued by the subtitle: "Your answer may determine how happy you can be." I thought it might be useful given what's happening,...

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A shrinking river. Putting together a slide deck for a talk next week, borrowing Brad Udall's trick of a horizontal line for visualizing the mean during different time periods....

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 This picture is of a Favosites globosus (Greene, 1898) coral fossil. The name it is now known is Emmonsia eximia (Davis, 1887). It was found in the Beechwood Limestone of Charlestown, Indiana USA. It dates to the Middle Devonian Period.This coral...

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Photographed from orbit at sunset, the rays of light penetrating gaps in the clouds span vast distances. Read More......

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This month's open thread on climate change topics. How are we in November already? And why is it still so warm... ?

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