ESMs (Earth system models) are crucial in estimating climate sensitivity, but show large uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks. A key step of reducing this uncertainty is to identify the processes that govern carbon-climate and carbon-concentration feedbacks driven by changes in terrestrial carbon stocks. Are these changing carbon stocks driven by changes to inputs, or changes…
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Savannah River National Laboratory has just released this video showing how they have developed an innovative remediation method for groundwater radioactive contaminants at the Savannah River Site. (The Savannah River Site is a national nuclear weapons site that shut down in the 1950s.) Their method has improved capture of contaminants, and at substantially lower cost than the prior approach.…
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This is a call for developing low-tech solutions to treat water contaminated by uranium mining in low income, developing countries. After visiting Kyrgyzstan a few weeks ago, and talking to several residents, Boris Faybishenko (Earth & Environmental Sciences, LBNL) urges the scientific community to come up with simple solutions for treating uranium-and-radium contaminated water, whether for…
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EESA has new representatives on Berkeley Lab’s Diversity and Inclusion Council: Travis O’Brien and Marilyn Saarni. The Earth Sciences Division thanks Jim Houseworth for his excellent service in this role over the last several years. (Jim is retiring this year.) Many volunteered to be EESA’s D&I representative. With such passionate interest in the EESA community, Travis and Marilyn invite those…
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Berkeley Lab and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) publicly released (on July 9) the final Volumes II and III of a peer-reviewed independent scientific assessment that discusses how hydraulic fracturing and acid well stimulation could affect water, atmosphere, seismic activity, wildlife and vegetation, and human health in California. The Berkeley Lab science…
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ESD’s Javier Ceja-Navarro (lead author) and Eoin Brodie, with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Mexico’s El College de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), discovered that coffee berry borers rely on bacteria in their guts to detoxify the massive amounts of caffeine they consume when they eat caffeine-rich coffee beans, their sole source of…
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ESD’s Bill Collins recently met with Governor Brown and a UN delegation on climate change. California's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be a model for global leaders in fashioning a universal climate change agreement
Read MorePeering deeply into the Amazon, which has recently seen two "megadroughts,” scientists may be able to measure the impact of climate change globally, and also collect clues about how California's vegetation might be affected by drought
Read MoreESD’s David Romps and Rusen Oktem are collecting three-dimensional data (using off-the-shelf digital cameras) on cloud behavior that have never been possible to collect before. In this way, Romps can measure how fast the clouds rise, which in turn can shed light on a wide range of areas, ranging from lightning rates to extreme precipitation…
Read MoreJill Banfield shares her perspective on how the DOE Joint Genome Institute helps advance her research, addressing knowledge gaps related to the roles of subsurface microbial communities in biogeochemical cycling.
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