Last fall, a group of Sustainability Science (SUSCI) students left the bustling New York City streets for the gold-and-red foliage of the Palisades, where Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) held its annual open house. On this warm, sunny autumn Saturday, about 15 miles north of Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, LDEO welcomed more than 2,000 visitors of all ages for this special celebration of its 75th anniversary.
The annual event includes lab tours, hands-on exhibits, and a lecture series featuring world-renowned LDEO research. The event was family-friendly and provided plenty of activities for children, with 53 interactive exhibits such as “Ice Flows! Get your hands into the polar regions with glacier goo!” and “Volcanoes! Create your own eruptions! Save a city from imminent destruction!”
Even for SUSCI students visiting for the open house, these interactive exhibits provided a great learning opportunity. SUSCI student Courtney Strydom cited the “Bathtub Science” exhibit as her favorite. “[They] had the interactive element for the kids but also had good info for adults to learn about the topic of brittle versus elastic surfaces,” Strydom said.
Current SUSCI student Camryn Louder (left), SUSCI alumna Olivia Colton (center), and SUSCI alumna Chandler Precht (right) posing with a tree core at the LDEO open house.
Other SUSCI students, like Camryn Louder, who works in the Tree Ring Lab under Dr. Brendan Buckley, volunteered at the event. The small, white building in the middle of LDEO’s campus holds a trove of tree cores, some reaching several feet in diameter and collected from all over the globe. Tree rings hold a record of past climate conditions, and the lab can decipher the information hidden in the tree rings to learn about regional climate conditions, global climate teleconnections, and how anthropogenic climate change impacts global forests. The lab’s researchers have published findings on the megadrought in the southwestern U.S., a wet period during the Great Famine in 14th century Europe, warming in Central Asia, and old-growth forests right here in New York City.
As part of this research, Louder typically spends her time coring trees, mounting the cores, and then counting tree rings under a microscope to determine how old the trees are. On the day of the open house, the outside world got a behind-the-scenes look at how these studies happen. “I gave them a tour of the lab, showed them how we take a tree core, and talked about the information we can get from tree rings,” she said.
Though some SUSCI students like Louder are regulars at LDEO, for many SUSCI students, this open house was their first visit to the campus. “The tree ring lab was so cool,” said SUSCI student Natalie Tripp, recounting her first impressions of LDEO. “The people there were so knowledgeable and I learned a lot about detecting megadroughts.”
Whether newcomers or regulars, many of the visitors expect to return when LDEO celebrates its 76th year at its open house next fall.
Sustainability Science students, faculty, and staff at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory open house.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Science program, offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School, prepares students for management and leadership positions in which they help organizations understand the technical aspects of sustainability, including predicting and addressing environmental impacts. Students learn strategies for responding to the ever-changing environment, predicting future environmental changes, and examining how these shifts affect society.
The program is customized for working professionals and offered as a full-time and part-time course of study. Students have the flexibility to choose from a variety of courses to position themselves for career advancement. New York City serves students as a living laboratory for developments in sustainability practice and as a source of many employers who hire program graduates.
