Soil harbors three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere, but until recently research into how warming affects the amount of carbon released from soil into the atmosphere was limited to investigations of the top meter of soil. Researchers at Berkeley Lab are the first to examine soils and sediments as deep as seven…
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Scientists who study the exchange of chemicals in rivers and streams examine activity taking place within the nutrient-rich portions of streambeds, floodplains, and riverbanks known as hyporheic zones – which provide habitat for various aquatic organisms. Berkeley Lab researchers investigating hyporheic exchange have now shown that meanders near the headwaters of the Colorado…
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In California a whopping 19 percent of the total electrical demand is used in some way to move or treat water. Peter Fiske, director of the Lab’s Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute wrote a piece published in R&D Magazine on opportunities for science and technology in creating sustainable water systems, including a look at water-energy research at…
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This Q and A article appeared first on the Berkeley Lab News Center. Previously, the work of the Watershed Function SFA Research team was featured during a podcast for News Deeply. You can hear Bhavna Arora talk about her research here. One in 10 Americans depends on the Colorado River for bathing and drinking.…
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The Earth and Environmental Sciences’ Watershed Function project led the first “Watershed Science Collaboration Workshop” during Sept 23-25, 2018 in Crested Butte, CO. Over 100 leading scientists from around the globe joined to identify and discuss crosscutting watershed frontier research challenges. Attendees included microbial and plant ecologists, hydrologists, geochemists, geologists, geophysicists, remote and snow sensing…
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The world is currently generating data at a break-neck pace — about 2.5 quintillion bytes per day — and this trend is only accelerating. To make sense of this torrent of information, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) has built an ecosystem of researchers to advance data-analytic methods and inquiry, develop and expand software and analytics tools, and share…
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Within the Department of Energy complex of national laboratories, the Geosciences Measurement Facility (GMF) at Berkeley Lab is distinguished by its ability to build, test, and deploy customized instrumentation and innovative data acquisition and telemetry solutions, which are enabling scientists to address some of the most critical Earth, energy and environmental challenges that we face.…
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Isotope geochemists at Berkeley Lab are the first to establish the degree of Potassium (K) isotopic fractionation by plants. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have a different number of neutrons. Scientists have just in the past decade begun studying for key nutrient elements (other than C,…
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Berkeley Lab researchers who study aquifer recharge and groundwater quality measured concentrations and isotopic composition of the trace element Strontium (Sr) in groundwater to evaluate how local topography affects the amount of groundwater recharge across a semi-dry riparian floodplain in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Their study location was the Rifle Site, one of 18 former…
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When not at work researching Arctic permafrost microbes or mountainous watersheds, research scientists Neslihan Taş (above left) and Erica Woodburn (above right) are out and about learning what it’s like across Berkeley Lab with fellow recipients of Early Career research awards from the Department of Energy, Berkeley Lab, and UC Berkeley. In December, Berkeley Lab…
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