New Berkeley Lab research maps how Earth’s myriad climates—and the ecosystems that depend on them—will move from one area to another as global temperatures rise. The approach foresees big changes for one of the planet’s great carbon sponges. Boreal forests will likely shift north at a steady clip this century. Along the way, the vegetation will relinquish more trapped carbon than most current climate models predict.

Clouds can both cool the planet, by acting as a shield against the sun, and warm the planet, by trapping heat. But why do clouds behave the way they do? And how will a warming planet affect the cloud cover? Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist David Romps has made it his mission to answer these questions.

A group of researchers that includes scientists from Berkeley Lab have developed a new way to explore 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. The new approach combines several remote-sensing tools to study the Arctic landscape, above and below ground, in high resolution and over large spatial scales.

At the southern tip of Australia, Berkeley Lab scientists are helping to verify that depleted natural gas reservoirs can be repurposed for use as geologic carbon sequestration sites.
In Mississippi, they’re exploring whether it’s possible to produce electricity from the Earth’s heat using CO2, as well as store some of the CO2 permanently underground.
Many other geologic [...]

The Southern Ocean, circling the Earth between Antarctica and the southernmost regions of Africa, South America, and Australia, is notorious for its High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyl zones, areas otherwise rich in nutrients but poor in essential iron. Sea life is less abundant in these regions because the growth of phytoplankton, the marine plants that form [...]

The same medical imaging technology that doctors use to noninvasively image the heart and brain is now giving scientists a close-up view of the subsurface world. Berkeley Lab scientists are developing a way to use Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography, or SPECT, to map 3-D changes in sediment samples without disturbing them.
Their work could help [...]

Berkeley Lab scientists are exploring whether a common soil bacterium can be engineered to produce liquid transportation fuels much more efficiently than the ways in which advanced biofuels are made today. The process would be powered only by hydrogen and electricity. The goal is a biofuel—or electrofuel, as this new approach is called—that doesn’t require photosynthesis.

In a Public Forum essay in the journal Science, a group of scholars including Berkeley Lab’s Paul Adams advocates an end to withholding computer source code in the publication of scientific results, calling the practice a “black box” that is creating far-reaching problems for understanding and reproducing new research findings.

This week’s ARPA-E Summit features several Berkeley Lab-led projects, all aimed at dramatically improving how the U.S. produces and uses energy. Among them is an effort to produce transportation fuel from tobacco. The goal is to engineer tobacco plants that use energy from the sun to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves.

A demonstration project in Australia has helped to verify that depleted natural gas reservoirs can be used for geologic carbon sequestration, a climate change mitigation strategy that involves pumping CO2 deep underground for permanent storage. The project also demonstrated that depleted gas fields have enough storage capacity to make a significant contribution to reducing global emissions.