Globally, soils store three times as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere or in living plants. Scientists don’t know what will happen to this carbon in response to climate change. An international group of scientists has proposed a new approach to soil carbon research that seeks answers. Their roadmap is published in the October 6 issue of the journal Nature and is co-authored by Berkeley Lab soil scientist Margaret Torn.

Last month, scientists from Berkeley Lab and several other U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories traveled to two small Alaskan towns — tiny dots amid the vastness of the tundra, and perfect places to observe Earth at a crossroads. The scientists are developing The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiment, a multidisciplinary effort to answer one of the most urgent questions facing researchers today: How will a changing climate affect the Arctic, and how will this in turn affect the planet’s climate?

Billions of tons of carbon trapped in permafrost may be released into the atmosphere by the end of this century as the Earth’s climate changes, further accelerating global warming, a new computer modeling study led by a Berkeley Lab scientist indicates. The study also found that soil in high-latitude regions could shift from being a sink to a source of carbon dioxide by the end of the 21st century as the soil warms in response to climate change.

A team led by Berkeley Lab scientists hopes to become the first in the world to produce electricity from the Earth’s heat using CO2. They also want to permanently store some of the CO2 underground. The technology could lead to a new source of clean, domestic energy and a new way to fight climate change.

A handful of muck or a bucket of water can teem with millions of microorganisms — a few of which could be the next big thing when it comes to learning how to create biofuels or understanding the planet’s carbon cycle. Exploring the microbial world is getting easier thanks to one of the world’s largest databases of genetic “fingerprints” maintained by Berkeley Lab scientists.

From the planet’s core to its surface, heat enables Earth’s magnetic field, spreads the sea floor, and keeps continents on the move. Much of the heat is “radiogenic,” from the radioactive decay of elements in the crust and mantle, but how much? By measuring neutrinos from deep in the Earth, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues at Japan’s KamLAND neutrino detector have published the most precise estimate yet of radiogenic heat.

On May 3, 2011, the 100th birthday of renowned physicist Luis Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for his work in particle physics at the Bevatron and known worldwide for his codiscovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, was celebrated by the American Physical Society’s Forum on the History of Physics with invited reminiscences from three physicists who worked with him closely during his career at Berkeley Lab: Richard Muller, Moishe Pripstein, and Arthur Rosenfeld.

Plants rely on a tight-knit army of soil microbes to defend themselves against pathogens, much the way mammals harbor a raft of microbes to avoid infections. The discovery, led by a Berkeley Lab team that used the PhyloChip, could help scientists develop ways to better protect the world’s food crops from devastating diseases. The scientists deciphered, for the first time, the group of microbes that enables a patch of soil to suppress a plant-killing pathogen.

Berkeley Lab scientists have developed one of the most detailed pictures yet of how climate change could impact millions of tons of methane frozen in sediment beneath the Arctic Ocean. They found that methane could seep into the Arctic Ocean and gradually overwhelm the marine environment’s ability to break down the gas. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

About a third of the airborne lead particles recently collected at two sites in the San Francisco Bay Area came from Asia, a finding that underscores the far-flung impacts of air pollution and heralds a new way to study its journey across vast distances. Scientists from Berkeley Lab and the California Air Resources Board used the lead particles’ isotopic signature as a chemical return address and traced some of it to coal and metal ore found in Asia.