Geoscience

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Surveilling carbon sequestration: A smart collar to sense leaks
December 13, 2022 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories engineers are working on a device that would help ensure captured carbon dioxide stays deep underground — a critical component of carbon sequestration as part of a climate solution. Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing CO2 — a greenhouse gas that traps heat...
Categories: Climate Change, Energy / Environment / Water
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Underground tests dig into how heat affects salt-bed repository behavior
November 3, 2021 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Scientists from Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories have just begun the third phase of a years-long experiment to understand how salt and very salty water behave near hot nuclear waste containers in a salt-bed repository. Salt’s unique physical properties can be used to provide...
Categories: Energy / Environment / Water
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Two people holding large hunks of pinkish salt. One is a cylinder the size of a basketball. The other is more rough, the size of a softball.

Catching energy-exploration caused earthquakes before they happen
March 10, 2021 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Geoscientists at Sandia National Laboratories used 3D-printed rocks and an advanced, large-scale computer model of past earthquakes to understand and prevent earthquakes triggered by energy exploration. Injecting water underground after unconventional oil and gas extraction, commonly known as fracking, geothermal energy stimulation and carbon dioxide sequestration all...
Categories: Energy / Environment / Water, Science / Technology / Engineering
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Hand holding white cube with a play button.

Iron rain fell on early Earth, new Z machine data supports
March 18, 2015 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine have helped untangle a long-standing mystery of astrophysics: why iron is found spattered throughout Earth’s mantle, the roughly 2,000-mile thick region between Earth’s core and its crust. At first blush, it seemed more reasonable that iron arriving from collisions between...
Categories: Materials Science, Physics, Science / Technology / Engineering, Space / Astronomy
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An artist's concept shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury.

Computer power clicks with geochemistry
January 28, 2014 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories is developing computer models that show how radioactive waste interacts with soil and sediments, shedding light on waste disposal and how to keep contamination away from drinking water. “Very little is known about the fundamental chemistry and whether contaminants will stay in soil or...
Categories: Chemistry, Computing, Energy / Environment / Water
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Study rebuts hypothesis that comet attacks ended 13,000-year-old Clovis culture
January 30, 2013 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Rebutting a speculative hypothesis that comet explosions changed Earth’s climate sufficiently to end the Clovis culture in North America about 13,000 years ago, Sandia lead author Mark Boslough and researchers from 14 academic institutions assert that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance. “There’s no...
Categories: Energy / Environment / Water, Science / Technology / Engineering, Space / Astronomy
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Boslough

Detecting tunnels using seismic waves not as simple as it sounds
December 6, 2012 • ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — You’d think it would be easy to use seismic waves to find tunnels dug by smugglers of drugs, weapons or people.You’d be wrong.Nedra Bonal of Sandia’s geophysics and atmospheric sciences organization is nearing the end of a two-year study, “Impro…
Categories: Homeland security, Science / Technology / Engineering
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