About the Earth Sciences Division

The Earth Sciences Division (ESD) is situated among five buildings on the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) 200 acre site. The Division Director's office is located on the third floor of Building 74. The ESD research and operations activities are supported at a level of more than $40 million a year, with a total of nearly 400 employees, UC faculty, guests, and students. ESD is organized into six Departments, seven Programs, and, in addition to access to Berkeley Lab's major facilities, has its own facilities and centers, which support researchers in conducting computational modeling, rock physics, isotope geochemistry, systems biology, microbial ecology, and field work in the subsurface, atmosphere and ocean.

ESD was founded in 1977 supporting research in geothermal, nuclear waste and geosciences programs. For over 30 years, Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division (ESD) has led the way in search of new energy resources, in cleaning up the environment, and in the study of climate change. ESD conducts fundamental research in hydrogeology and reservoir engineering, geophysics and geomechanics, geochemistry, and microbial ecology. What makes ESD unique is the capability for investigating from the nanoscale to the field scale, using cutting-edge Berkeley Lab facilities such as DOE's Advanced Light Source, the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and the Molecular Foundry.

This work has led to numerous innovations and discoveries, including:

1. Developing ways to extract the maximum amount of shale gas with the minimum impact to surrounding rock formations.
2. A programmable ocean float that continuously tracks the biological processes of the ocean's carbon cycle.
3. A hand-held microarray that quickly and comprehensively identifies bacterial species from any environmental source (without any culturing required).
4. A mapping tool that combines massively parallel computing resources with advanced electromagnetic measurement techniques to detect hydrocarbon and geothermal energy sources.
5. Cutting-edge geophysical methods for tracking environmental remediation treatments.
6. Studies aimed toward the capture of CO₂ with the simultaneous production of geothermal energy.
7. Volcano research that has led to new ways of understanding how the earth works.
8. A portable electromagnetic sensing tool for detecting unexploded ordnance.
9. Discoveries of bacteria that digest oil (and thereby mitigate against oil spills).

In keeping with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and with Berkeley Lab's collective mission, it is ESD's mission to address local, national, and global problems focusing on fundamental, crosscutting science common to many energy resource problems and environmental issues.

ESD would like to thank its sponsors and collaborators, including the DOE and the University of California, the scientific community, and Berkeley Lab for their support.

Click on the links below to read more about the Earth Sciences Division:

• Division Director Leadership
• News and Events
• Organizational Chart
• 30th Anniversary (2007)

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our major sponsors in the Department of Energy, which include the Office of Science, the Office of Fossil Energy, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and the Office of Environmental Management. We also appreciate the support received from other state and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NASA. Lastly, we must also acknowledge and thank our industrial, as well as international collaborators, who provide both financial and in-kind support through various partnership projects, and who bring additional ideas, data, and experience to ESD.