Benjamin Gilbert Wins Prestigious Young Investigator Award from MSA

On November 11, 2009, Earth Sciences Division’s own Benjamin Gilbert was chosen by the Mineralogical Society of America as 2010’s Young Investigator Award winner. This award— the highest honor for a young career scientist working in mineralogy or related fields—marks the first time ever that a full-time (non-faculty) Earth Sciences Division scientist has received a “Young Scientist” award from one of the major earth science societies. Gilbert will be presented the award at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver, Colorado, October 31–November 3, 2010.

In response to the announcement, Gilbert said, “It was a fantastic surprise to receive this award, whose list of previous recipients contains several of the scientists I most respect in geochemistry and mineralogy. I regard the reward as a recognition of the superb experimental facilities and scientific collaborations that have been available to me since I was encouraged by Jill Banfield to come to Berkeley and start working in the newly developing area of nanogeoscience.”

Gilbert has made important contributions to the rapidly evolving field of nanogeoscience—the study of the properties and geochemical interactions of natural nanoscale minerals. Much of his research involves the development and application of synchrotron x-ray experiments and analysis methods for the study of mineral nanoparticles. Research accomplishments include: the discovery of stable cluster formation by iron oxyhydroxide nanoparticles; observation of structural transformations in ZnS nanoparticles associated with water binding; the identification of nanoscale silicate inclusions in zircons; and x-ray spectroscopic studies of the electronic structure of manganese oxides. More recently, his research has begun to apply ultrafast x-ray methods to study electron transfer to ferric iron oxide nanoparticles with sub-nanosecond temporal resolution. These studies are reported in more than 50 peer-reviewed publications that include collaborations with scientists from many disciplines.

Gilbert obtained a B.A. in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 1994 and a Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000. His graduate research was based upon synchrotron x-ray spectromicroscopy studies at the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, for which he received the SRC Aladdin Lamp Award. He performed post-doctoral research at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2004, he joined the Earth Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and founded (with colleagues Jill Banfield and Glenn Waychunas) the Berkeley Nanogeoscience Center. In April 2007, he was promoted to a career scientist position.

Congratulations, Ben, from everyone in the Earth Sciences Division!

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For more information about the award, including a list of past recipients (such as Jill Banfield and Earth Sciences Division Director Don DePaolo!), please visit the award page of the Mineralogical Society of America.

Berkeley Lab to participate in Statewide ‘Shakeout’ Drill October 15th

Source: TABL

The Great California ShakeOut will take place across the state October 15th, and Berkeley Lab will be participating. A Drop, Cover, Hold and Evacuation drill will take place at 10:15 a.m., similar to those conducted during the Lab’s Emergency Preparedness Week last spring. Read more »

Nari Narasimhan Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

ESD is proud to announce that the Groundwater Resources Association of California (GRA) has recently awarded our own T.N. (Nari) Narasimhan its Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions in the field of groundwater hydrology. The honor was conferred on October 7, 2009, in Sacramento, during the 18th Annual Conference of GRA and the concurrent 27th Biennial Groundwater Conference of the Center for Water Resources, University of California.

As described in the citation, “This award is presented annually to individuals for their exemplary contributions to the groundwater industry and for contributions that have been in the spirit of GRA’s mission and organization objectives. Individuals that receive the Lifetime Achievement Award have dedicated their lives to the groundwater industry and have been pioneers in their field of expertise.”

Nari noted in response to the award that “my encounter with groundwater started in 1957, over half a century ago, when I saw for the first time a water-well drilling rig in a small village close to the Ganges River in Eastern India.  It has been an interesting and rewarding journey ever since. The groundwater profession is an enlightened profession, one which has placed thoughtful emphasis on continued education over the past century.  Therefore, this recognition is particularly meaningful and valuable to me.”

Congratulations, Nari, from all the people whom you have helped and influenced in the Earth Sciences Division!

View the announcement in TABL »

ESD Town Hall Meeting

Click here for the Powerpoint Slides »

EMGEO ElectroMagnetic Geological Mapper wins 2009 R&D100 Award

EMGEO ElectroMagnetic Geological Mapper enables investigators to “see what is there,” in the offshore subsurface, as never before, leading to new detection ability (both in area coverage and resolution), new efficiency, and new savings.

Seismic imaging methods have a long and established history in hydrocarbon reservoir exploration. Yet they have not proven effective in discriminating different types of reservoir fluids, such as brines, oil, and gas. Over time, because of this inability to discriminate, billions of dollars per year are lost in drilling dry holes—up to 100 million dollars per each unsuccessful drilling, and typically 2 to 6 months of unrecoverable labor costs for hundreds of people—while significant hydrocarbon reservoirs not revealed by conventional seismic-based methods remain undiscovered.

This limitation has led to the development of new geophysical technologies, specifically the use of low-frequency electromagnetic energy to complement seismic methods. In contrast to seismic data, electromagnetic measurements have been shown to be highly sensitive to changes in fluid types and hence the location of hydrocarbons. However, successfully extracting and processing the information from electromagnetic data has proved up to now to be a formidable problem.

The problem is especially significant in the search for hydrocarbon energy in highly complex offshore geological environments, where many of the world’s oil and gas deposits remain to be found. Such offshore hydrocarbon exploration is an especially arduous task because reservoirs generally reside in highly complex geological environments, often beneath miles of ocean. Deep-water reservoirs are exceedingly difficult to successfully locate without recourse to imaging them and the background geology in three spatial dimensions (3D). To provide a maximally consistent electromagnetic data interpretation to geologists, such imaging requires large-scale modeling, spatially exhaustive survey coverage, and multicomponent data volumes.

To map the oceanic subsurface at a scale and resolution previously unknown, EMGeo unites the latest in computing power with EM measuring techniques.

The EMGeo ElectroMagnetic Geological Mapper, the interpretive software developed by Gregory A. Newman and Michael Commer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, answers this challenge. EMGeo overcomes the technological problems involved in interpreting offshore hydrocarbon reservoirs by exploiting 21^st century computing power—massively parallel computing resources—and combining that power with advanced electromagnetic measurement techniques, to provide a unique imaging capability for hydrocarbon deposits. This capability has also proven very useful in solving other emerging problems, such as finding sources of alternative (specifically geothermal) energy and conducting optimally effective environmental remediation. Using sophisticated parallelization schemes, EMGeo can be scaled up to tens of thousands of computing processors, providing a unique advantage over comparable technologies in treating large-scale (“industrial”) 3D data sets (Commer and Newman, 2008). It enables investigators to “see what is there,” in the offshore subsurface, as never before, leading to new detection ability (both in area coverage and resolution), new efficiency, and new savings.

The benefits of joint imaging of MT and CSEM data are illustrated in this example: (a) The earth model, showing the reservoir at 1 km depth and the salt deposit (2 to 6 km depth), both rendered in blue; (b) CSEM image; (c) MT image; and (d) joint CSEM and MT image.

To map the oceanic subsurface at a scale and resolution previously unknown, EMGeo unites the latest in computing power with EM measuring techniques. Among such measurement techniques, the key emergent EM technology with respect to hydrocarbon exploration is controlled source electromagnetics (CSEM). The CSEM technique senses regions of enhanced resistivity that can be associated with oil or gas deposits. This technique interrogates down to reservoir depths as deep as 4 km beneath the ocean floor with the current technology. EMGeo processes the data provided by CSEM to create images of hydrocarbon reservoirs at an unmatched level of detail and spatial extent.

EMGeo also has an unmatched capability for processing other types of electromagnetic data. Previously considered a source of noise when measuring CSEM data, magnetotelluric (MT) fields—arising primarily from the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetosphere—complement CSEM fields, since they provide greater depth information than CSEM data. EMGeo can join the strengths of CSEM and MT for never-before-possible unambiguous imaging of subtle reservoir targets in complex geological media. The benefits of joint imaging of MT and CSEM data are illustrated in this example: (a) The earth model, showing the reservoir at 1 km depth and the salt deposit (2 to 6 km depth), both rendered in blue; (b) CSEM image; (c) MT image; and (d) joint CSEM and MT image. When imaging only the CSEM data, the reservoir is indicated, but not the deeper salt. When MT data are imaged, the salt structures show up, but there is no indication of the reservoir. Finally, when both types of data are analyzed together, the reservoir and salt structures are imaged at much better resolution than what could be obtained otherwise (Commer and Newman, 2008).

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» Commer, M., and G. A. Newman, New advances in three-dimensional controlled-source electromagnetic inversion. LBNL-63010. Geophysical Journal International, 172, 513–535, 2008.

» Read a summary of the ESD’s 2009 R&D 100 award winning technology

NSF Funding: Carbon Flux Explorers to Become Operational

Jim Bishop and his Earth Sciences Division (ESD) colleagues were first to capture important biological processes of the ocean carbon cycle using programmable Carbon Explorer floats, which measure carbon particles at depth and then resurface to report by satellite. Thanks to three-year funding from the National Science Foundation, improved Carbon Flux Explorers, capable of imaging particles and life forms in the ocean’s biological pump every 24 minutes, will be brought to full operational status. The new instruments are being developed by the Lab’s Engineering Division and ESD in collaboration with the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, with shipboard testing to resume in 2010. read more »

ESD Organizational Changes

There are several key additions and changes to organization as follows:

As of April 1, 2009, Greg Newman will take over from Jim Berryman as the Department Head for the Earth Sciences Division’s Geophysics Department. Jim has done an excellent job over the past three-plus years and we thank him for his service to the Division and in welcoming Greg.

As many of you are aware, Greg is a leading figure in the development of large scale inverse models for geophysical exploration. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1987, worked for many years as a staff member at Sandia National Lab in New Mexico, and came to LBNL in 2004. His expertise has significantly enhanced our Division capabilities in computational geophysics, and we look forward to his leadership in maintaining the health and vitality of our Geophysics Department.

In addition, we have made several additions to the Programmatic leadership in the Division. The first change is the addition of Bill Collins (also serves as the Climate Science Department Head) joining Margaret Torn as a Program Head in Climate and Carbon Sciences to address the specific program area of Climate. Second, Division Director, Don DePaolo will assume Program Head responsibilities in the Fundamental and Exploratory Research; however, Ernie Majer will continue to support Don where necessary. The final change is the addition of Dave McCallen to the Nuclear Energy and Waste Program. Dave, who is a recent addition to the LBNL-ESD organization will focus on coordinating the Nuclear Energy research for LBNL and ESD’s program while Jens Birkholzer continues leading the research in response to Nuclear Waste.

Here is a summary of our organization and their respective Department or Program Head(s):

Departments

The ESD Departments are aligned with the various scientific disciplines and consist of personnel whose core capabilities or expertise are mapped to an array of research areas in support of the ESD Programs. It is the role of the Department to provide the personnel resources needed to conduct the work as needed by a specific project within a given Program. Due to the crosscutting nature of the staff’s expertise, where personnel may support multiple Programs, this alignment by Department enables the Division to address various operations functions, such as Safety Line Management.

• Climate Science, Bill Collins
• Ecology, Terry Hazen
• Geochemistry, Mark Conrad
• Geophysics, Greg Newman
• Hydrogeology, Hui-Hai Liu

Programs

It is the role of the Program to develop a long-term scientific agenda and purpose and ensuring its alignment with LBNL and ESD’s mission and purpose. The Programs work with the Departments to match the disciplinary capabilities to the needs of the appropriate funding agency and to address the many research challenges we face today.

• Climate and Carbon Sciences, Bill Collins and Margaret Torn
• Energy Resources, Ernie Majer
• Environmental Remediation and Water Resources, Susan Hubbard
• Fundamental and Exploratory Research, Don DePaolo
• Geologic Carbon Sequestration, Curt Oldenburg
• Nuclear Energy and Waste, Dave McCallen and Jens Birkholzer

Expedition Antarctic 2009

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Norm Miller was one of eight experts to participate in the 2009 Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Swan and sponsored by BP to engage sixty next generation student leaders in energy security and climate change. Read more »

ESD Town Hall Meeting

Click here for the Powerpoint Slides »

Happy 90th Birthday to Paul A. Witherspoon!

Today is Dr. Paul A. Witherspoon’s 90th birthday! Witherspoon, who is also a Professor Emeritus with the Department Of Material Sciences and Engineering, UC Berkeley, was the first Earth Sciences Division Director (1977-1982). Today’s occasion is marked by our birthday announcement shown here.