Wildfires are an ancient force shaping the environment, but they have grown in frequency, range and intensity in response to a changing climate. At ORNL, scientists are working on several fronts to better understand and predict these events and what they mean for the carbon cycle and biodiversity.
Wildfires have shaped the environment for millennia, but they are increasing in frequency, range and intensity in response to a hotter climate. The phenomenon is being incorporated into high-resolution simulations of the Earth’s climate by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a mission to better understand and predict environmental change.
As extreme weather devastates communities worldwide, scientists are using modeling and simulation to understand how climate change impacts the frequency and intensity of these events. Although long-term climate projections and models are important, they are less helpful for short-term prediction of extreme weather that may rapidly displace thousands of people or require emergency aid.
JungHyun Bae is a nuclear scientist studying applications of particles that have some beneficial properties: They are everywhere, they are unlimited, they are safe.
Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.
Simulations performed on the Summit supercomputer at ORNL revealed new insights into the role of turbulence in mixing fluids and could open new possibilities for projecting climate change and studying fluid dynamics.
Like most scientists, Chengping Chai is not content with the surface of things: He wants to probe beyond to learn what’s really going on. But in his case, he is literally building a map of the world beneath, using seismic and acoustic data that reveal when and where the earth moves.
An innovative and sustainable chemistry developed at ORNL for capturing carbon dioxide has been licensed to Holocene, a Knoxville-based startup focused on designing and building plants that remove carbon dioxide
Rigoberto Advincula, a renowned scientist at ORNL and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee, has won the Netzsch North American Thermal Analysis Society Fellows Award for 2023.
ORNL will team up with six of eight companies that are advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants with the mission to achieve a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade.