Earth Sciences Division (ESD) Department of Energy (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

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208 posts categorized "Research Highlights"

06/22/2015

Tree of Life Gets New Members

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.

06/11/2015

Biraud Studies Warming Trend in Alaska

Sebastien Biraud will lead a group of scientists in an aerial campaign this summer (2015) to measure gas concentrations, aerosols, and cloud properties—to find out why current climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is getting warmer.

Wang, Tokunaga Win ACS Editors' Choice Award

ESD scientists Shibo Wang and Tetsu Tokunaga recently won an American Chemical Society (ACS) Editors' Choice Award for their paper on supercritical CO2-brine capillary pressure-saturation relations in limestone sands.

06/08/2015

Characterizing Arctic Ecosystem Functional Zones

A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by ESD’s Haruko Wainwright developed an ecosystem functional zonation approach to characterize the spatial variability of properties that influence carbon cycling in the Arctic – in high resolution and over landscape scales.

05/21/2015

Clay Barriers Restrict Ionic Transport

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.

The Microbiome of Leaf-Nosed Bats

ESD ecologist Neslihan Taş was one of the leading authors of a recently published paper studying the relationship between different leaf-nosed bat feeding strategies and host microbiome composition.

05/15/2015

Bacteria as Biosensors of Environmental Damage

Eric Dubinsky was part of a team whose work, reported on in mBio (the online journal of the American Society for Microbiology), has shown the power of microbial communities to predict sources of contamination in the environment.

05/11/2015

Radiative Forcing, Albedo in Land-Use Scenarios

ESD’s Andy Jones and Bill Collins recently demonstrated the effectiveness of a new method for quantifying radiative forcing from land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) within the integrated Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM).

04/24/2015

MnO2 Nanosheets Need Only Water, Sunlight To React

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.

04/17/2015

Good IDEAS on Virtual Terrestrial Ecosystems

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.