A new class of materials with a record-shattering internal surface area may have the right stuff to efficiently strip carbon dioxide from a power plant’s exhaust. Lab scientists hope to find out soon.

The fact that glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are thinning is not disputed. However, few researchers have attempted to rigorously examine and quantify the causes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Surabi Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers.

A first-of-its-kind computer simulation that mirrors real-world observations of methane bubbling up from a seabed in the Arctic Ocean provides further evidence that warming oceans may unleash vast quantities of methane trapped in hydrate deposits buried beneath the seafloor.

Greenhouse gas measurements taken from aircraft and towers will help improve inventories of California’s emissions, which will help scientists verify the reductions mandated by ambitious legislation passed by California in 2006 to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.

Berkeley Lab and China’s Tsinghua University forged ties on Aug. 12 to promote the development and implementation of building energy efficiency, a move intended to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in both the U.S and China.

The biggest environmental challenges facing scientists today will require a better understanding of nanosized minerals, which abide by their own often mysterious rules. Scientists at the Berkeley Nanogeoscience Center are working to learn these rules.

Two researchers at Berkeley Lab, Evan Mills and Michael Wehner, contributed to an analysis of the effects of climate change on all regions of the United States, described in a major report released June 16 by the multi-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Global climate change is hotly debated, to say the least. But two experts warn that using short-term trends that show little temperature change (or even slight cooling) to refute global warming is misleading. The long-term pattern clearly shows human activities are causing the earth’s climate to heat up.

The Department of Energy will invest $777 million in 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years as part of President Barack Obama’s plans to reinvigorate American science. Berkeley Lab will be home to the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, led by Don DePaolo, director of the Earth Sciences Division, to study carbon dioxide storage deep underground.