Cadet and Faculty Teaching Outreach

Dr. Patrick Baker, CPT Nathaniel Sheehan, and CDT Nate Buss led a “Day in the Life of the Hudson and Harbor” event with a group of twenty-nine children from homeschool groups and girl scouts organized by Mrs. Dana Ouellette. The children and their families learned that the Hudson River, below Troy, is an estuary and how the connection to the Atlantic Ocean is observed physically (tides), chemically (salinity), and biologically (migratory fish and crabs). This annual event, sponsored by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuary Program with assistance from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University), encourages students to collect data to create snapshots of the river at locations from New York City to Albany. Data on weather, tide, turbidity, water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and biodiversity were shared to connect the observations at West Point to the larger Hudson estuary ecosystem.