Susan Hubbard Named 2017 American Geophysical Union Fellow

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has named Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director for the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab, as a 2017 AGU Fellow.
Read MoreJuly 27, 2017
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has named Susan Hubbard, Associate Laboratory Director for the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab, as a 2017 AGU Fellow.
Read MoreJuly 27, 2017
Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area, has been named by the American Geophysical Union as a 2017 AGU Fellow.
Read MoreJuly 24, 2017
In a paper that appeared online on July 18, 2017 at Weather and Climate Extremes, a team of Berkeley Lab scientists—including EESA's Bill Collins and Christina Patricola—reports that climate change attributed to human activity made a Colorado storm much more severe than would otherwise have occurred.
Read MoreJuly 18, 2017
As environmental scientists move towards understanding earth systems at greater resolution than ever before, it’s critical that they have access to needed data sets. Yet much of these data are not archived, publicly available, or collected in a standardized format, due to the multiple challenges of coordinating efforts across independent research groups and institutions worldwide. Now researchers at Berkeley Lab are taking action to address these challenges. Thanks to $3.6 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Science, the Lab’s Computing Sciences and Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) are partnering on a three-year project to develop an archive that will serve as a repository for hundreds of DOE-funded research projects.
Read MoreJuly 17, 2017
Today we celebrate 40 years of innovative research. On July 17, 1977, Berkeley Lab formed the Earth Sciences Division (ESD) in response to the U.S. energy crisis. Now—as the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA)—it has evolved into a research group studying a broad range of the most pressing environmental and subsurface energy challenges. To commemorate the occasion, EESA has created a a collection of materials that tells the Area’s story: a timeline, a video, and an alumni and friends network page.
Read MoreJuly 7, 2017
The high temperatures that hit the San Francisco Bay Area during the week of June 18 got a lot of residents thinking about warm weather. And with many cities hitting triple digits, many locals, no doubt, were wondering how to handle extreme heat in the future. By the end of the week, Travis O’Brien, a climate scientist with…
Read MoreJune 29, 2017
It turns out your skin is crawling with single-celled microorganisms – and they’re not just bacteria. A study by a researcher at Berkeley Lab's Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) and the Medical University of Graz has found that the skin microbiome also contains archaea, a type of extreme-loving microbe, and that the amount of it varies with age.
Read MoreJune 26, 2017
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is one of the most studied spills in history, yet scientists haven’t agreed on the role of microbes in eating up the oil. Now EESA researchers have identified all of the principal oil-degrading bacteria as well as their mechanisms for chewing up the many different components that make up the released crude oil.
Read MoreJune 16, 2017
Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental & Earth Sciences Area (EESA) have led the development of a new approach for monitoring terrestrial ecosystems, and have used the system to discover new insights about how processes in different compartments of an Arctic Tundra ecosystem interact over space and time.
Read MoreJune 12, 2017
As an ecologist working with the Environmental & Earth Science Area’s Watershed Scientific Focus Area (SFA), Heidi Steltzer and her research assistant, Chelsea Wilmer, spend a lot of time conducting fieldwork in the picturesque Colorado mountains. Now, as she’s studying snowmelt and its effects on plant growth in Crested Butte, Colorado, Steltzer is bringing the SFA’s science to a much wider audience.
Read More