Jayant Sathaye, who heads the International Energy Group in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a leading participant in the Governors’ Global Climate Summit taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov 18 and 19, in Beverly Hills, CA.

Berkeley Lab scientists have analyzed the remarkable genome of a bacterium constituting the first single-species ecosystem. Desulforudis audaxviator was discovered 2.8 kilometers beneath the surface of the earth in a South African gold mine, where it exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat.

Abrupt climate change is the focus of IMPACTS, a major new program bringing together six DOE national laboratories to investigate the instability of marine ice sheets, warming of the boreal forests and Arctic, megadroughts in the Southwest, and catastrophic release of methane from hydrates.

Some meteorites and other objects from the early solar system have quite different ratios of oxygen isotopes than those found on Earth. Isotope self-shielding, however, a popular explanation for this difference, failed to explain isotope ratios in recent work at the Advanced Light Source.

Berkeley Lab chemical scientists working at the Advanced Light Source are part of a multinational team who have showed that, bad as the traffic is, the most harmful air pollution in Mexico City may not come from fossil fuels. Instead the culprit may be garbage incineration.

Earth scientists from Berkeley Lab and other institutions have measured how changes in stress in rocks affect changes in the speed of seismic waves at depths where earthquakes begin. The measurements could lead to a “stress meter” for better understanding how fault-zone stress is related to earthquakes.

Lab researchers are joining a multi-agency project to measure California’s summertime greenhouse gas emissions to determine the state’s relative contribution to the global total. Aircraft with atmospheric sampling devices will fly over the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley areas to quantify regional carbon exchange.

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249
BERKELEY, CA — Most oceanographers have assumed that, in the areas of the world’s oceans known as High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) regions, the iron needed to fertilize infrequent plankton blooms comes almost entirely from wind-blown dust. Phoebe Lam and James Bishop of the Earth Sciences Division at the Department of [...]