ESD’s Jill Banfield led a team that recently discovered many new groups or phyla of bacteria. The more than 35 new phyla equal in number all the plant and animal phyla combined. ESD’s Kenneth Williams was also involved in the research.
Carl Steefel and Ian Bourg (and others) proved, for the first time, that anions can be completely excluded from the smallest pores within a compacted illitic clay material, indicating the effectiveness of clay-based barriers for waste containment.
Jill 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.
The convergence of world-class microscopic characterization and computational resources has made it possible to address subsurface geological carbon sequestration using a new generation of pore-scale flow and reactive transport models.
ESD’s Carl Steefel was one of the key developers of Chombo-Crunch, a reactive flow code that could enhance efforts toward carbon sequestration and greater safety in the oil and gas industry.
Mack Kennedy will be the lead point of contact for the Berkeley Lab aspect of the multiphase FORGE effort, which could unlock access to a domestic, geographically diverse, and carbon-free source of clean energy.
A team of scientists (including ESD Geochemistry Department Head Ben Gilbert) recently investigated the photoreduction of manganese (a key element in environmental processes) and quantified the yield and timescales of Mn(III) production.
ESD’s Carl Steefel, Eoin Brodie, and Charlie Koven, among others, collectively sought ways of applying new scientific computing capabilities to studies of Earth’s subsurface. One of the results was IDEAS.
Jill Banfield and others compared two ways of using next generation genomic sequencing machines, one of which produced significantly longer reads than the other—perhaps helping to close the gaps in microbial identification that exists now.
The third of three video productions related to the SFA 2.0 project describes the powerful influence of metabolic potential—the collective metabolic capabilities of subsurface microbial communities and their impact on ecosystems.
