Office of Biological and Environmental Research Weekly Report

September 22, 2008

New Field Site at Hanford for Studies of Uranium Transport and Biogeochemistry in Groundwater: A team of DOE Office of Science-supported researchers at PNNL with collaborators from the USGS, INL, LBNL, LANL, and four universities have installed a one-of-a-kind field experimental facility at the Hanford site to study the reactive transport behavior of uranium in a long contaminated groundwater aquifer. This site is representative of contaminated sites in Hanford’s Columbia River corridor. The movement of water in the contaminated aquifer is complex because of close hydrologic coupling with the nearby Columbia River. The behavior of uranium at the site has defied scientific explanation for over ten years, preventing development of an effective remediation strategy to reduce discharges to the Columbia River. The experimental facility is heavily instrumented to characterize and monitor the physical, chemical, biological processes that are thought to control uranium transport at the site. The experimental site will allow scientists to evaluate fundamental field-scale scientific hypotheses on physical, hydrologic, chemical, and biologic factors and processes that control uranium concentrations in site pore- and groundwaters under different hydrologic conditions.

Media Interest: Press release in preparation at PNNL

Contact: David Lesmes, SC 23.1, (301)-903-5802

Revisiting 2000 Years of Climate Change. Knowledge of climate change over past centuries provides the context of modern climate change; however, the lack of widespread instrumental climate records necessitates the use of proxy data such as tree-rings, corals, ice cores, and historical documentary records. A recent study in the September 8 issue of the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences USA, co-authored by DOE-sponsored researcher Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, examines reconstructions of surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for the past 2000 years, using a greatly expanded set of proxy data. The 1998 ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of Bradley et al. (referring to the shape of the time versus temperature curve) has been challenged by some in the climate change research community due to uncertainties in tree-ring data that were used. The new study is significant since it demonstrates that Northern Hemisphere surface temperature warming appears anomalous for at least the past 1300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. The amplitude of warming during the Medieval Warm Period is greater than previously reported, albeit still not reaching recent levels.

Reference: Mann M.E., Z. Zhang, M.K. Hughes, R.S. Bradley, S.K. Miller, S. Rutherford and F. Ni, 2008: Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 105, 13252.

Media Interest: Yes

Contact: Anjuli Bamzai, SC-23.1, (301) 903-0294

DOE Scientist Featured at National Advisory Research Resources Council Meeting. Dr. Richard D. Smith of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory presented the science lecture at the September 16 meeting of the advisory council for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His topic was “New Proteomics Technologies: From Systems Biology Research to Broad Clinical Application.”. Smith directs the NCRR-funded Proteomics Research Resource for Integrative Biology at PNNL. He explained how this program builds on technologies developed for DOE missions. The importance of DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory for his program was noted. The NCRR is a cross-disciplinary unit of NIH with an annual budget of $1.1 billion. It is responsible for providing resources used by large numbers of biomedical scientists. Several of the resources are located at DOE National Laboratories. Smith’s talk and the other presentations at the meeting can be found at: http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/about_us/advisory_council/presentations_sept08.asp

Media Interest: No

Contact: Roland F. Hirsch, SC-23.2, (301) 903-9009