San Onofre: A Year Off the Grid

ESD’s Bob Budnitz discusses the safety problems behind the recent outage of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Diego, suggesting that the implications of a prolonged outage are mostly economic.

Korneev Seismic Sensor Animation

Strip the City (Science Channel-Discovery) will include a short segment devoted to the magneto-acoustic seismic sensor deployed in 2012 by ESD’s Valeri Korneev (aided by Paul Cook) at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) site.

Laboratory seismic monitoring of supercritical CO2 flooding in sandstone cores using the Split Hopkinson Resonant Bar technique with concurrent x-ray CT imaging

ESD’s Seiji Nakagawa led a team of investigators (including ESD’s Tim Kneafsey, Tom Daley, and Barry Freifeld) in conducting laboratory measurements of the seismic properties of sandstones during supercritical CO2 injection.

ESD “Detectives” Probe Mysterious Microbes

ESD’s scientists Hoi-Ying Holman, Gary Andersen, and Susan Hubbard are all prominently featured in a recent LBNL news release on unusual bacteria and their impact on the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill (and bioremediation in general).

Call for Proposals for FY2014 LDRDs

Director Alivisatos recently issued the call for proposals for the FY2014 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program. All scientific staff from our Division are encouraged to think of potential innovative proposal topics.

Earth Scientists Talk Microbes and EBI

ESD’s Susan Hubbard, John Coates, and Gary Andersen talk about the role of microbes in our energy future and the role of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) in a pair of short videos posted by the Medill News Service.

ESD at AGU: A Zone of Constant Activity

The AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month (December 2012) was a great success, especially for LBNL’s Earth Sciences Division and our homebase at the site, the ESD booth—a zone of constant activity.

ESD Dives into Permafrost Soil

ESD scientists led by Susan Hubbard are exploring the little-known world of permafrost soils, which store almost as much carbon as the rest of the world’s soils and about twice as much as is in the atmosphere.

Remote monitoring of freeze-thaw conditions in Arctic soils using the complex resistivity method

ESD’s Yuxin Wu recently led a scientific team (including ESD’s Susan Hubbard) in conducting laboratory column experiments to explore the potential of the “complex resistivity” method for monitoring the freeze-thaw transitions of Arctic permafrost soils.

Monitoring the geologic storage of carbon dioxide using multi-component SAR interferometry

ESD’s Don Vasco joined Italian scientists Alessio Russi and Fabrizio Novali in combining interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data from ascending and descending orbits, to estimate both quasi-vertical and quasi-east–west displacements for an active large-scale carbon dioxide storage project.