Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Film professor Zhenhai Tang will introduce and discuss mainland Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (aka Sanxia Haoren), a last minute entry into the 2006 Venice Film Festival, that won the Golden Lion award thanks to its top-notch cinematography and wonderful storytelling. Still Life interweaves the story of a miner (Han Sanming) who travels thousands … Read more
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever … Read more
Most people believe that any hurricanes that travel northward make a landfall on Eastern Long Island, and create few problems for people in the N.Y – N.J. Metropolitan Region. However, historical research shows that hurricanes have made direct landfalls in New York City in 1821 and 1993. The Major 1938 Hurricane made a landfall 70 … Read more
The 1883 eruption of Krakatau volcano in the Sunda Straits of Indonesia, on August 26 to 27th, 1883 was the second largest explosive eruption of historic time. Approximately 13.6 km3 of magma was erupted during this event, mostly in the form of voluminous pyroclastic flows. Fatalities from this eruption from the direct effects of tephra … Read more
One of the forecasted side effects of anthropogenic climate change is rising sea levels. Two factors contribute to this effect: expansion of the oceans due to rising temperatures, and increased melting of land-locked glaciers and ice sheets. Recent radar measurements from Greenland indicate that ice discharge into the North Atlantic is accelerating. What does this … Read more
Geologists and seismologists generally agree that earthquakes produce dislocations known as faults and that preexisting faults tend to localize new earthquakes. The bedrock of New York City, always considered to be solid and impervious to seismic activity, is cut by a great number of brittle faults which belong to two contrasting sets oriented NE and … Read more