About 80 EESA scientists are representing Berkeley Lab at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week in New Orleans. AGU’s annual fall meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world, with more than 24,000 attendees. For the first time in several years, the meeting is being held away…
Read More
Hydrogeologist Chun Chang is one of 42 postdoctoral fellows working with Berkeley Lab's Earth and Environmental Sciences Area. He studies the geological sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
Read More
Catastrophic fires in Northern California burned more than 110,000 acres in Sonoma and Napa counties last month – including 8 percent of the Russian River watershed. Now with the rainy season underway Berkeley Lab’s research – which seeks to understand how the hydrology and microbiology of the surface and groundwater system respond to extreme events – has become even more critical.
Read More
The Watershed Function Project held an annual retreat on November 9th, which included over 80 team members and collaborators assembled from 14 institutions. Through fast-paced presentations and breakout sessions, and with a focus on the East River Watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin, the team discussed new insights about how mountainous watersheds respond…
Read More
Tim Kneafsey, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab's Earth & Environmental Sciences Area, will lead a new $9 million project aimed at removing technical barriers to commercialization of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), a clean energy technology with the potential to power 100 million American homes. Berkeley Lab will partner with seven other DOE national labs and six universities to develop field experiments focused on understanding and modeling rock fractures, an essential element of geothermal systems. Scientists will use the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota to create small-scale fracture networks in crystalline rock 1,500 meters below ground.
Read More
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 More
Berkeley Lab has chosen Peter Fiske, who holds a doctorate in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University, to lead the Water-Energy Resilience Institute as its first director. The Institute is a Lab-wide initiative aimed at increasing resilience in a future world that will face both water and energy constraints, and is linked to the…
Read More
As a middle school student in eastern Massachusetts, Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) research scientist Christina Patricola became fascinated with the snowstorms that frequently blanketed her hometown—and quickly recognized her passion for atmospheric science. But despite her early interest, Patricola says she doesn’t know if she would have continued on a scientific career path…
Read More
Guest blog by Robin Lopez Robin Lopez has just been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP), which is highly competitive. Well-deserved, Robin—congratulations! I did not expect to be selected. I was overjoyed just by the fact that I could apply, and that those who wrote letters of recommendations had faith in…
Read More
The California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program has awarded Berkeley Lab a total of $2.7 million for two projects that will be led by Energy Geosciences Division scientists, Kurt Nihei and Jonny Rutqvist make geothermal energy more economically attractive.
Read More