climate change – Lightsources.org

A toothy temporal map of Arctic climate change

2022/12/052023/01/16

In the vast, remoteness of the Arctic, few have the opportunity to gather data on the environmental conditions over time or decipher the long-term effects of climate change. What is required? A considerable period to observe, a nearly autonomous method or actor for collection, a robust character to withstand the harsh surroundings. Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark are tackling this issue through an interdisciplinary NordForsk project. At DanMAX beamline, the group will analyse a narwhal tusk to determine its chemical composition and biomineralization, both important potential markers of the changing environment.

Significant, accelerated signs of climate change have been reported in the Arctic and Antarctic zones, which research shows impact global climate. Scientists are looking at different ways to interpret the terrestrial and oceanic changes occurring in these areas, and how the change affects native wildlife. The described NordForsk project, developed by researchers from Denmark, Greenland and Sweden, seeks to elucidate the structure and formation of the narwhal tusk, and map the full life history of the animal through the growth lines along the full length of the tusk.

Read more on the MAX IV website

Image: Peter A. S. Vibe readies samples of the tusk at DanMAX beamline.

Credit: MAX IV Laboratory

I am doing science that is more important than my sleep!

2022/01/122022/01/12

NSLS-II #LightSourceSelfie

Dan Olds is an associate physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory where he works as a beamline scientist at NSLS-II. Dan’s research involves combining artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform real-time analysis on streaming data while beamline experiments are being performed. Often these new AI driven methods are critical to success during in situ studies of materials. These include next generational battery components, accident safe nuclear fuels, catalytic materials and other emerging technologies that will help us develop clean energy solutions to fight climate change.

Dan’s #LightSourceSelfie delves into what attracted him to this area of research, the inspiration he gets from helping users on the beamline and the addictive excitement that comes from doing science at 3am.

Uniting science to address climate change

2021/10/262021/10/28

Key leaders and researchers from major US and European big science laboratories, namely EIROforum (Europe’s eight largest intergovernmental scientific research organisations, including CERN, EMBL, ESA, ESO, ESRF, EUROfusion, European XFEL and ILL) and the US Department of Energy’s seventeen National Laboratories (Ames, Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermi, Idaho, Jefferson, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, NETL, NREL, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, PPPL, SLAC, Sandia and Savannah River), met by videoconference ahead of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26).

Sharing the same values, and convinced that science performs best through collaboration, the EIROforum’s directors and NLDC (comprised of directors from the US National Laboratories) affirmed their common commitment to unite science towards a sustainable and resilient global society and economy:

By stepping up their scientific collaboration on carbon-neutral energy and climate change
By sharing best practices to improve the climate sustainability and carbon footprint of Europe’s and US’s big science facilities
By sharing knowledge and fostering public engagement on clean energy and climate change research

Read more on the ESRF website

Image: COP26

Credit: ESRF

SESAME’s Materials Science beamline starts full user operation

2020/12/222021/01/06

On 17 December 2020, SESAME opened the doors of its Materials Science (MS) beamline to a team from the Royal Scientific Society (RSS) in Jordan, making this instrument, which is dedicated to structural studies with X-ray powder diffraction, the third of the Centre’s beamlines to be fully operational and hosting users.

“We are looking at the first diffraction pattern ever measured for a user sample on the newly-commissioned MS beamline at SESAME. RSS has a place in the history of SESAME”, said HRH Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, President of the RSS.

The RSS team consists of Kyle Cordova, Executive Director of Scientific Research and Assistant for Research and Development to HRH Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, and his colleague, the Junior Staff Scientist Ala’a Al-Ghourani. “Our research is focused on discovering new, highly-porous materials for use in mitigating the effects of climate change. Understanding our material’s structure at the atomic level is critical for ensuring that the target application can be met. SESAME’s MS beamline allows us to do this – through X-ray diffraction we can solve the chemical structure in order to improve our material’s end performance” indicated Kyle Cordova, adding “Being the first users is an immense honour. I am proud to be representing Jordan’s largest applied research institution, the Royal Scientific Society, in this historic first!”

Read more on the SESAME website

Image: Ala’a Al-Ghourani and Mahmoud Abdellatief preparing to mount a sample for study in the experimental hutch of the MS beamline.

Credit: Royal Scientific Society

Ocean acidification risks deep-sea coral reef collapse

2020/09/182020/09/23

Diamond X-rays were used in a recent study that suggests climate change is triggering changes to the chemistry of deep-sea coral reefs which may cause their foundations to become brittle.

Reefs are home to a multitude of aquatic life and the underlying structures of these reefs could fracture as a result of increasing ocean acidity caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

Rising acidity

Researchers measured the lowest and most acidic pH level ever recorded on living coral reefs hundreds of metres below the surface of the ocean in Southern California. The corals were then raised in the lab for one year under the same conditions.

Scientists observed that the skeletons of dead corals, which support and hold up living corals, had become porous due to ocean acidification and rapidly become too fragile to bear the weight of the reef above them. The Diamond Manchester Imaging Branchline (I13-2) enabled the team to retrieve phase sensitive images that revealed gradients and de-mineralisation profiles in the coral samples.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: Lophelia pertusa skeleton with evidence of dissolution around the outside walls. Image: Sebastian Hennige

Converting emissions into valuable fuel

2020/07/23

Researchers used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to improve their technique to convert CO₂ into ethanol, a valuable chemical that can be used in a variety of industrial applications. Ethanol is also an attractive alternative fuel.

Ethanol has been proven to reduce emissions when compared to gasoline, but the renewable fuel is most often made of corn and wheat so there is a strong interest in non-food production methods. By capturing and converting carbon emissions to ethanol, the fuel’s environmental benefits could be multiplied.

The research team led by Prof. Ted Sargent at the University of Toronto focused on producing chemicals through CO₂ conversion—such as ethanol, ethylene and methane—helping to transform harmful greenhouse gases into useful products. The group aims to produce the target chemicals, in this case ethanol, with high outputs and minimal energy inputs.

Read more on the Canadian Light Source website

Image: Xue Wang installing a membrane electrode assembly MEA cell for testing the performance of the N-CCu catalyst in CO2RR.

Mapping metals in feathers

2020/04/212020/04/27

Synchrotron technique promising for tracing metals in nature

University of Saskatchewan (USask) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) researchers have mapped metals in bird feathers, a technique that could help make environmental monitoring less destructive.

In a recent paper published in X-ray Spectrometry, researchers used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron at USask to examine the level and distribution of zinc in feathers from birds that were fed high-zinc diets.

“The same technique could be applied to toxic metals like mercury, even at low concentrations,” says Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientist Fardausi Akhter. “You could just take a feather from the bird and be able to show if it was exposed to toxic metals present in the environment.”

Akhter, a toxicologist interested in applying synchrotron techniques to environmental questions, first started working on this project with Graham Fairhurst, a USask avian ecophysiologist, when they were both working as postdocs supervised by Catherine Soos. Soos is a wildlife health specialist and research scientist at ECCC, and adjunct professor at USask (Department of Veterinary Pathology, Western College of Veterinary Medicine), whose research focuses on investigating impacts of large-scale environmental changes on wildlife health. Her team often uses feathers as tools to evaluate exposure to toxic metals, and impacts of exposure on health of wild birds.

Image: Part of the research team at CLS (left to right): Fardausi (Shathi) Akhter, Jamille McLeod (ECCC), Bruce Pauli (ECCC), Peter Blanchard (CLS), Landon McPhee (ECCC), and Catherine Soos (ECCC)

Using soil to combat climate change

2019/09/162019/09/20

Researchers are using synchrotron light to better understand the impact of climate change on more than three trillion metric tonnes of soil carbon around the world.

Using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, scientists from across the United States investigated the plant root mechanisms that control long-term storage of carbon in deep soil. Their findings will have ramifications for global industries such as agriculture, which have touted the benefits of carbon sequestration as their contribution to fighting climate change.

“The significance of our work is we not only show that plants are conduits of carbon into the soil, but the roots also regulate how much carbon the deep soil can store or lose,” said Dr. Marco Keiluweit, a biogeochemist at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture in the University of Massachusetts.

Image: Rhizogenic weathering extract; (full image here)

Using reed waste for sustainable batteries

2019/08/062019/09/19

With the changing climate, researchers are focusing on finding sustainable alternatives to conventional fuel cells and battery designs. Traditional catalysts used in vehicles contribute to increasing carbon dioxide emissions and mining for materials used in their design has a negative impact on the environment. Prof. Shuhui Sun, a researcher from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, and his team used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to investigate an Iron-Nitrogen-Carbon catalyst using reed waste.

They hope to use the bio-based materials to create high-performance fuel cells and metal-air batteries, which could be used in electric cars. “An efficient oxygen electrocatalyst is extremely important for the development of high-performance electrochemical energy conversion and storage devices. Currently, the rare and expensive Pt-based catalysts are commonly used in these devices. Therefore, developing highly efficient and low-cost non-precious metal (e.g., Fe-based) catalysts to facilitate a sluggish cathodic oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is a key issue for metal air batteries and fuel cells,” said Qilang Wei, the first author of the paper.

A step closer to smart catalysts for fuel generation

2019/07/222019/09/20

Researchers at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil in collaboration with the ALBA Synchrotron have performed the first detailed measurement of the strong metal-support interaction (SMSI) effect in Cu-Ni nanoparticles supported on cerium oxide.

A better understanding of this effect is essential for developing smart catalysts that are more selective, stable and sustainable. The quest for the best catalysts in industry has been a long one, but a new study by Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, in collaboration with the ALBA Synchrotron, has come a step closer. For the first time, researchers have found evidence of what could be the origin of the SMSI effect in catalysts supported on cerium oxide.

Catalysts are used to increase the reaction rate of a given chemical reaction, and have applications in a wide variety of fields. In heterogeneous catalysis, the catalyst is usually composed of metal nanoparticles supported on metal oxides. Among them, CeO₂-based catalysts have unique structural and atomic properties that make them suitable in the cutting-edge environmental industry of fuel cells and hydrogen. In this field, they are being explored as high-end photocatalytic reactors for the thermal splitting of water and carbon dioxide. However, what has been termed as the SMSI effect can undermine their desired properties.

>Read more on the ALBA website

Image: (extract, full picture here) Near Ambient Pressure – X-ray Photoemission Spectroscopy allowed the identification of the chemical components of the nanoparticles in situ.

Enhancing solar energy production

2019/07/102019/09/20

Research investigates ways to convert titanium dioxide into a new photoactive material in the visible light range.

The search for clean and renewable energy sources has intensified in recent years due to the increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and the consequent increase in the average temperature of the planet. One such alternative source is the conversion of sunlight into electricity through photovoltaic panels. The efficiency in this conversion depends on the intrinsic properties of the materials used in the manufacturing of the panels, and it increases year by year with the discovery of new and better materials. As such, solar energy is expected to become one of the main sources of electric energy by the middle of this century, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Titanium dioxide ( $T i O_{2}$ ) is an abundant, nontoxic, biologically inert and chemically stable material, known primarily as a white pigment used in paints, cosmetics and even toothpastes. $T i O_{2}$ is also often used in sunscreens since it is especially capable of absorbing radiation in the ultraviolet region. However, this same property severely limits the use of $T i O_{2}$ for solar energy conversion, since the ultraviolet emission comprises only 5 to 8% of the total energy of the solar light.

Can this $T i O_{2}$ property be extended to the visible light region to increase the conversion of sunlight into electricity? To answer this question, Maria Pilar de Lara-Castells et al. [1] conducted an innovative research in which they discuss how a special treatment can change the optical properties of $T i O_{2}$ .

Why having your head in the clouds could be a really good thing

2019/04/152019/04/17

The ATMOS research group in the NANOMO unit, led by Nønne Prisle, Associate Professor at the University of Oulu, are trying to find out what kind of chemistry is happening in cloud droplets and tiny nanometer-sized aerosol particles in the atmosphere. This knowledge could eventually, hopefully, give us more accurate theoretical models to understand the ongoing climate change.
– The only thing that can halter climate change is to stop emitting CO₂. Nønne Prisle is very, very clear on that. Even so, she says, if we want to take any other step to try to counter climate change, we really need to know what’s going on in the clouds since these processes could be quite critical.
The ATMOS team are using the beamline HIPPIE at MAX IV being so-called commissioning experts, which means that the experiment is done both to provide useful data but also to verify the capacity and capability of the beamline experimental station.

Image: From left to right: Robert Seidel, Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin; Nønne Prisle, Kamal Raj and Jack Lin, University of Oulu at the HIPPIE beamline.

Scientist discover that charcoal traps ammonia pollution

2019/02/112019/03/19

Discovery could have implications for agricultural management and climate change mitigation

Cornell University scientists Rachel Hestrin and Johannes Lehmann, along with collaborators from Canada and Australia, have shown that charcoal can mop up large quantities of nitrogen from the air pollutant ammonia, resulting in a potential slow-release fertilizer with more nitrogen than most animal manures or other natural soil amendments. The results were published Friday in Nature Communications.

Ammonia is a common component of agricultural fertilizers and provides a bioavailable form of the essential nutrient nitrogen to plants. However, ammonia is also a highly reactive gas that can combine with other air pollutants to create particles that travel deep into the lungs, leading to a host of respiratory issues. It also indirectly contributes to climate change when excess fertilizer inputs to soil are converted into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

In Canada, ammonia emissions have increased by 22 per cent since 1990, and 90 per cent are produced by agriculture, particularly from manures, slurries and fertilizer applications. Mitigating this pollutant—without limiting fertilizers and food growth for our growing world population—is key to a sustainable future.

Image: Rachel Hestrin (right) on the beamlines at Canadian Light Source with fellow Cornell researcher Angela Possinger.

Demonstrating a new approach to lithium-ion batteries

2018/08/032018/08/06

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, Diamond Light Source and Argonne National Laboratory in the US have demonstrated a new approach that could fast-track the development of lithium-ion batteries that are both high-powered and fast-charging.

In a bid to tackle rising air pollution, the UK government has banned the sale of new diesel and petrol vehicles from 2040, and the race is on to develop high performance batteries for electric vehicles that can be charged in minutes, not hours. The rechargeable battery technology of choice is currently lithium-ion (Li-ion), and the power output and recharging time of Li-ion batteries are dependent on how ions and electrons move between the battery electrodes and electrolyte. In particular, the Li-ion diffusion rate provides a fundamental limitation to the rate at which a battery can be charged and discharged.

One size does not fit all when exploring how carbon in soil affects the climate

2018/05/032018/05/18

Scientists from Stanford University are opening a window into soil organic carbon, a critical component of the global carbon cycle and climate change.

“We have to know what kind of carbon is in soil in order to understand where the carbon comes from and where it will go,” said Hsiao-Tieh Hsu, a PhD student in chemistry at Stanford University and a member of a Kate Maher’s research group.

The natural fluxes of soil organic carbon, the exchange of carbon moving from vegetation to the soil and recycled by microorganisms before being stabilized in the soil or returned to the atmosphere, is 10 to 20 times higher than human emissions. Even the smallest change in the flux of soil organic carbon would have a huge impact on the climate.

Soil organic carbon occurs naturally and is part of the carbon cycle. Through photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As plants and their roots decompose, they deposit organic carbon in the soil. Microorganisms, decomposing animals, animal feces and minerals also contribute to the organic carbon in the soil. In turn, plants and microorganisms “eat” that carbon, which is an essential nutrient.

All of this results in different “flavours” or compounds within the soil, say Hsu and Maher, who is also a faculty member of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage.

Image: Members of the research team at the East River, Colorado, field site (left to right): Hsiao-Tieh Hsu; Grace Rainaldi, Stanford undergraduate; Corey Lawrence, research geologist at United States Geological Survey; Kate Maher; Matthew Winnick, Stanford postdoctoral fellow.
Credit: Kate Maher.

Putting CO2 to a good use

2018/04/302018/05/02

One of the biggest culprits of climate change is an overabundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

As the world tries to find solutions to reverse the problem, scientists from Swansea University have found a way of using CO2 to create ethylene, a key chemical precursor. They have used ID03 to test their hypotheses.

Carbon dioxide is essential for the survival of animals and plants. However, people are the biggest producers of CO₂ emissions. The extensive use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or natural gas has created an excess of CO₂ in the atmosphere, leading to global warming. Considerable research focuses on capturing and storing harmful carbon dioxide emissions. But an alternative to expensive long-term storage is to use the captured CO₂ as a resource to make useful materials.