This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project involves the renovation of the second floor of the "New Core Lab" at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in order to create the Lamont Center for Biogeochemistry. This will enable the institution to support collaborative activities in an increasingly inter-disciplinary field and to make it easier for researchers to share high-end analytical facilities. It will allow the use of modern biogeochemical research techniques that are difficult to use in the current facilities.
The program of work includes interior renovation, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, building controls, fire protection, casework and other smaller items. The project will replace the mechanical and electrical infrastructure that serves the second floor. This will include all new electrical distribution and piping. The plumbing systems serving the laboratories will also be replaced, but the vast majority of the work will be on the heating, ventilating and cooling side.
The renovated facility will help to satisfy the need for interdisciplinary research that bridges across the biological, atmospheric, geological, oceanographic, and hydrological sciences and that increases our understanding of the two-way coupling between biological systems and the physical and chemical characteristics of soils, sediments, air, or water. Examples of the type of research that will be done in the renovated facility includes: the reconstruction of past hydroclimate conditions using oxygen isotope measurements from trees without annual rings and the study of the Asian monsoon for the past millennium using tree-ring widths, density, and isotopic indices; the use of uranium series geochemistry to reconstruct deep-sea particle fluxes and past changes in Antarctic upwelling and productivity; estimating changes in deep-ocean carbonate chemistry during the last glacial cycle; the reconstruction of past variations in ocean circulation, sea-surface temperature gradients, and terrestrial climate using geochemical analyses of foraminifer shells in deep-sea sediments; the timing and abruptness of ice sheet instability events; the reconstruction of past changes in ocean acidity and hence atmospheric carbon dioxide levels using boron isotopes in planktonic foraminifera and coral; the response of planktonic ecosystems to physical forcing resulting from global climate change; the microbial assemblage in deep-sea sediments, the pattern of active and pathogenic microbes in the Hudson River estuary, and the microbes associated with soil carbon sequestration. The proposed renovations will also provide facilities that will be used to provide research experiences for undergraduates and high-school students.
OIA-0963217 Lamont Center for Biogeochemistry: Renovation of the Biology and Paleo-Environment Laboratories Prepared by Arthur Lerner-Lam Deputy Director Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University This Project Outcomes Report summarizes the completed renovation of outdated laboratories to create a new Center for Biogeochemistry at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Prior to the renovation, Lamont’s biogeochemists were dispersed among several poorly configured and outdated laboratories with insufficient space and environmental management for modern analytical instrumentation. Additionally, exhaust ventilation and air handling/management did not meet modern standards for safe and contaminant-free operation, severely limiting the kinds of experiments that could be conducted. With the commissioning of the newly renovated laboratories, our scientists, technicians and students from a breadth of earth and environmental science disciplines have been able to interact synergistically in a modern facility explicitly designed to address some of the frontier problems facing human society. The new laboratories will allow us to improve our understanding of how climate variability will affect the marine and terrestrial ecosystems that sustain our planet, and to develop the evidence base that could support the important decisions that lie ahead. Our new capabilities will allow us to examine biogeochemical systems at scales ranging from single molecules to individual cells to complex flora and fauna to whole ecosystems. Our researchers are addressing questions about the sustainability of marine food webs, the acidification of the oceans, the permanence of coral reefs, and the fate of polar ecosystems both above and below the ice. Progress on each of these research themes – as well as many others – will depend on the collaborations enabled by the advanced analytical instrumentation now contained in contiguous new laboratories. For example, our researchers will be characterizing climate variability during the rise of Homo sapiens by studying the chemistry and biology of sediments recovered by coring in lakes in the East African Rift Valleys and the nearby Indian Ocean, enabling scientists to link climate variability to the evolution of our species. Using remarkably accurate techniques to analyze ancient leaf waxes entrained in tectonic faults, our organic geochemists will be able to reconstruct the temperature increase resulting from frictional heating during past earthquakes, which will enable seismologists to reconstruct the earthquake history near some of our most vulnerable cities. The variability of ocean uptake of carbon dioxide over geologic time will be examined by looking at the ratios of certain isotopes extracted from the shells of marine microorganisms, giving us a historic record of ocean acidification. New infrastructure supporting marine microbiology and genomics will allow us to investigate the molecular and cellular processes that allow organisms to adapt to changing ocean chemistry and temperature. The educational mission of the Observatory has been advanced as well. The new labs provide bench space for postdoctoral scientists and graduate and undergraduate students with interests in biogeochemistry, allowing an enlarged cohort to be trained in state-of-the-art analytical techniques and conduct their own research. The Lamont Core Repository is located one floor below the new laboratories, providing additional opportunities for productive interactions. In fact, in the nearly one year since the laboratories were commissioned, more than 40 visitors, post-doctoral scholars, and graduate and undergraduate students have been able to work productively alongside their collaborators and mentors. These opportunities will contribute to the development of a highly skilled workforce not only at Lamont, but also at other institutions. This NSF Award for the new Lamont Center for Biogeochemistry has resulted in the construction of a world-class facility that will continue to benefit our current investigators and students as well as new recruits. It will be one of the cornerstones we will use to build upon our existing strengths and breadth in Earth and Environmental Science to provide the basic research results needed by society as we face the global challenges that lie ahead.
