From the NYT article about Kuheli Dutt's Nature Geoscience Commentary:

"The field’s lack of diversity gained new urgency in May when her graduate student cohort was targeted with a series of racist emails. The messages, sent to affiliates of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia by a person outside the community, said that black people were genetically inferior and did not belong in academia. It was “hurtful and invalidating” to be told that she didn’t belong in the world that had drawn her in since childhood, Ms. Varuolo-Clarke said. “It was an isolated incident. But it brought to the surface what still needs to be done in the field.” 

In a commentary last week in Nature Geoscience, Kuheli Dutt, Lamont-Doherty’s assistant director for academic affairs and diversity, wrote that “a lack of diversity and inclusion is the single largest cultural problem facing the geosciences today.”