2009 Awards and News
9 2009
On Tuesday October 13, Doris Sloan, adjunct professor, will be inducted as an Academy Honorary Fellow at the annual dinner of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Congratulations!
July 2009 Professor Barbara A. Romanowicz was honored by the American Geophysical Union with the 2009 Inge Lehmann Medal. The Lehmann Medal is given not more often than every other year in recognition of outstanding contributions to the understanding of the structure, composition, and dynamics of the Earth’s mantle and core. This award recognizes Barbara's research covering the full span of seismological studies from the crust to the inner core. The medal will be presented to Barbara at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony in San Francisco.
7 2009
Professor Bill Dietrich received the Robert E. Horton Medal of the American Geophysical Union. The medal recognizes outstanding contributions to hydrology. Bill received this great honor "for his studies of the hydrologic and fluid mechanical basis of land forming processes and acknowledgment as the world leader in setting theoretical agenda for this field outside of glaciated and eolian regions." The Horton Medal will be presented to Bill at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony in San Francisco.
5 2009
Professor Don DePaolo and a team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were selected to receive one of only 46 large grants given out from the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Science as part of the recent competition for Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC's). Professor DePaolo will be the Director of the new Center, which will focus research on the basic chemistry, physics, hydrology and biogeochemistry associated with the injection and storage of supercritical carbon dioxide in sandstone formations underground. The Center will be funded at $4 million/year for 5 years. Professor Jill Banfield from EPS is also involved, as is Professor Garrison Sposito from ESPM. The research includes collaborations with Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Labs, UC Davis, and MIT.
For more information see http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/04/28_efrc.shtml.
High-level technician to manage an electron microprobe laboratory under faculty supervision. Duties include maintenance and operation of all subsystems of a Cameca SX-51 microprobe; analysis and imaging; instruction; usage scheduling; recharge tracking; assistance with related microbeam facilities (i.e. SEM). Further information about the lab facilities can be viewed at: http://eps.berkeley.edu/research/facilities.php. B.A. (or higher degree) in geosciences or materials science and familiarity with spectroscopic methods required. Salary is commensurate with experience. Other duties as needed. For a detailed description of the position and applications instructions, please go to http://jobs.berkeley.edu/ (Job #9813). This is a temporary full-time position with possibility of continued employment up to 900 hours. It is possible that this position may become permanent, however another recruitment will be necessary if this happens.
Leif Karlstrom received an Outstanding Student Poster at AGU last year, congratulations!
4 2009
Bill Cassata has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations!
We are delighted to let you know that Walter Alvarez was appointed the 2010 Faculty Research Lecturer. This prestigious honor is awarded by the Berkeley faculty to its most distinguished members. Congratulations!
3 2009
A newly laid, 32-mile underwater cable finally links the state's only seafloor seismic station with the University of California, Berkeley's seismic network, merging real-time data from west of the San Andreas fault with data from 31 other land stations sprinkled around Northern and Central California.
Laying of the MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System) fiber-optic cable was completed in 2007 by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to power and collect data from a cluster of scientific instruments nearly 3,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, 23 miles from the coastal town of Moss Landing. A broadband seismometer that had been placed on the seafloor in 2002 was connected to the cable on Feb. 27, 2009, obviating the need to send a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) every three months to replace the battery and collect data.
"Before, we had to wait three months to even know if the instruments were alive," said Barbara Romanowicz, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. Now, she said, "we can use the data from the seafloor station in real time together with those from the rest of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network" to determine the location, magnitude and mechanism of offshore earthquakes, learn about the crust at the edge of the continental plate and understand better the hazards of the San Andreas fault system that runs north and south through the state.
[Full Article]2 2009
Raymond Jeanloz and Lars Stixrude (an alumnus of this department) received the prestigious Cozzarelli Prize for the most exceptional paper in physical and mathematical sciences published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.
Their paper on "Fluid helium at conditions of giant planetary interiors" theoretically describes the changes chemical bonding of He as it transforms to a metallic fliud at elevated pressures and temperatures, with important implications for understanding the internal structure and evolution of giant planets. Congratulations!
The figure is a summary of electronic properties of fluid helium at high pressures and temperatures. Red lines are predicted Hugoniots for precompressions. The blue solid line represents the closure of the electronic energy gap, and purple dotted lines are the conditions at which the He concentration reaches 10% (labeled ''onset'') and 50% (labeled ''PI'') of pressure ionization in the plasma model (22). For comparison, model temperature distributions for the interiors of Jupiter, extrasolar planet HD209458b and brown dwarf Gl229b are indicated by dashed black curves.
1 2009
If smog were a kitchen creation, the recipe would go something like this: Start with a miasma of organic hydrocarbons from spilled gasoline, incomplete combustion and trees. Add nitrogen oxides from combustion in factory furnaces and vehicle engines. Zap with a dose of sunlight, and wait. The result: a heaping serving of photochemical smog.
[Full Article]
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