The "specific sequence — of a wet winter followed by warm, hot conditions to dry the fuel out" is what's needed to spark these larger fires, said Park Williams, a climate scientist and an assistant professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Severe wildfire seasons like the one that has devastated California this fall may occur more frequently because of climate change, says Park Williams, a climate scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

It's comforting to think of Earth as solid and immovable, but that's false. The world is vibrating, stretching and compressing. We're shaking right along with it. “The earth is ringing like a bell all the time,” said Spahr Webb, a seismologist at Columbia University.

"Every degree of warming does more to promote fire than the previous degree of warming," said Park Williams, a Columbia bioclimatologist, who found that anthropogenic warming doubled the amount of area in the U.S. burned by forest fires between 1984 and 2015.

Are we an invasive species? How long before earth's polar ice caps melt? Columbia scientists Matt Palmer and Maureen Raymo answer reader questions for The New York Times.

Artificial intelligence may one day make human participation in scientific research redundant. But that might not be a bad thing says Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia.

Each year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice as the planet warms. New research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet, which could change how scientists like Columbia's Marco Tedesco think about global sea levels.