Bill Collins, director of the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, has been selected by AGU as the 2019 Tyndall History of Global Environmental Change Lecturer. The Tyndall History of Global Environmental Change Lecture honors the life and work of physicist, John Tyndall. Tyndall’s measurements in the late 1850s and early 1860s verified the importance of…
Read MoreFour postdoctoral fellows have been awarded EESA Early Career Development Grants. Each of the four projects is aligned with different goals of the EESA Strategic Plan. Chun Chang’s project, Producing Oil-in-Water Nanoemulsion for Efficient Proppant Emplacement Using Hydrodynamic Cavitation, is relevant to the Sustainable Earth Grand Challenge; Michael Whittaker’s project, Observing Geochemistry with Atomic Resolution,…
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Scientists collect samples in the Rocky Mountains as part of the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area project. (Credit: Roy Kaldschmidt/Berkeley Lab) The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) recently received federal approval to proceed with preliminary design work for a state-of-the-art building that would revolutionize investigations into how interactions among microbes, water, soil,…
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Drilling a single oil or natural gas well with hydraulic fracturing requires between 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water. When the well starts flowing, the fluid that is brought back to the surface alongside the oil and gas is a combination of the injection fluid and brine from aquifers – a difficult-to-treat mixture known as…
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As world population grows, so do concerns that water availability and water quality will continue to diminish. Changes in land use, climate change, and extreme weather exacerbate these concerns, which threaten not only our fresh water supply but also systems that rely on watershed exports, such as hydropower and agriculture. Although watersheds are recognized as…
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Growing up in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa, Tadewos Getachew witnessed firsthand the lack of access to clean drinking water. He closely watched the city grapple with infrastructure challenges related to treating waste water or fixing leakages in the water distribution system. Getachew realized that he wanted to develop engineering solutions. “I wanted to build a…
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Last week’s massive southern California earthquakes shut down Ridgecrest Regional Hospital throughout the July 4 holiday weekend while the tiny town of Ridgecrest assessed the damages. A new optical sensor developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could speed up the time it takes to evaluate whether critical buildings like these are safe to occupy…
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Berkeley Lab scientists (from left) Deborah Agarwal, Juliane Mueller, Reetik Sahu, Bhavna Arora, and Charuleka Varadharajan are developing a computational tool for smarter groundwater management. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab) The overpumping of groundwater in California has led to near environmental catastrophe in some areas – land is sinking, seawater is intruding, and groundwater storage capacity…
Read More Long ago, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that we humans “know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” Five hundred years and innumerable technological and scientific advances later, his sentiment still holds true. But that could soon change. In a report published in Nature Communications, a…
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A recent workshop held at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science focused on how to apply hydrologic transport data skills to real-world hydrologic problems. Zexuan Xu, an EESA postdoctoral fellow, coordinated the May event, “Critical Timescales of Hydrologic Transport.” Zexuan is currently working as part of a team of researchers studying ecosystem changes in a…
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