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      in Energy

      MIT students combat climate anxiety through extracurricular teams

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      Climate anxiety affects nearly half of young people aged 16-25. Students like second-year Rachel Mohammed find hope and inspiration through her involvement in innovative climate solutions, working alongside peers who share her determination. “I’ve met so many people at MIT who are dedicated to finding climate solutions in ways that I had never imagined, dreamed of, or heard of. That is what keeps me going, and I’m doing my part,” she says.Hydrogen-fueled enginesHydrogen offers the potential for zero or near-zero emissions, with the ability to reduce greenhouse gases and pollution by 29 percent. However, the hydrogen industry faces many challenges related to storage solutions and costs.Mohammed leads the hydrogen team on MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team (EVT), which is dedicated to harnessing hydrogen power to build a cleaner, more sustainable future. EVT is one of several student-led build teams at the Edgerton Center focused on innovative climate solutions. Since its founding in 1992, the Edgerton Center has been a hub for MIT students to bring their ideas to life.Hydrogen is mostly used in large vehicles like trucks and planes because it requires a lot of storage space. EVT is building their second iteration of a motorcycle based on what Mohammed calls a “goofy hypothesis” that you can use hydrogen to power a small vehicle. The team employs a hydrogen fuel cell system, which generates electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen. However, the technology faces challenges, particularly in storage, which EVT is tackling with innovative designs for smaller vehicles.Presenting at the 2024 World Hydrogen Summit reaffirmed Mohammed’s confidence in this project. “I often encounter skepticism, with people saying it’s not practical. Seeing others actively working on similar initiatives made me realize that we can do it too,” Mohammed says.The team’s first successful track test last October allowed them to evaluate the real-world performance of their hydrogen-powered motorcycle, marking a crucial step in proving the feasibility and efficiency of their design.MIT’s Sustainable Engine Team (SET), founded by junior Charles Yong, uses the combustion method to generate energy with hydrogen. This is a promising technology route for high-power-density applications, like aviation, but Yong believes it hasn’t received enough attention. Yong explains, “In the hydrogen power industry, startups choose fuel cell routes instead of combustion because gas turbine industry giants are 50 years ahead. However, these giants are moving very slowly toward hydrogen due to its not-yet-fully-developed infrastructure. Working under the Edgerton Center allows us to take risks and explore advanced tech directions to demonstrate that hydrogen combustion can be readily available.”Both EVT and SET are publishing their research and providing detailed instructions for anyone interested in replicating their results.Running on sunshineThe Solar Electric Vehicle Team powers a car built from scratch with 100 percent solar energy.The team’s single-occupancy car Nimbus won the American Solar Challenge two years in a row. This year, the team pushed boundaries further with Gemini, a multiple-occupancy vehicle that challenges conventional perceptions of solar-powered cars.Senior Andre Greene explains, “the challenge comes from minimizing how much energy you waste because you work with such little energy. It’s like the equivalent power of a toaster.”Gemini looks more like a regular car and less like a “spaceship,” as NBC’s 1st Look affectionately called Nimbus. “It more resembles what a fully solar-powered car could look like versus the single-seaters. You don’t see a lot of single-seater cars on the market, so it’s opening people’s minds,” says rising junior Tessa Uviedo, team captain.All-electric since 2013The MIT Motorsports team switched to an all-electric powertrain in 2013. Captain Eric Zhou takes inspiration from China, the world’s largest market for electric vehicles. “In China, there is a large government push towards electric, but there are also five or six big companies almost as large as Tesla size, building out these electric vehicles. The competition drives the majority of vehicles in China to become electric.”The team is also switching to four-wheel drive and regenerative braking next year, which reduces the amount of energy needed to run. “This is more efficient and better for power consumption because the torque from the motors is applied straight to the tires. It’s more efficient than having a rear motor that must transfer torque to both rear tires. Also, you’re taking advantage of all four tires in terms of producing grip, while you can only rely on the back tires in a rear-wheel-drive car,” Zhou says.Zhou adds that Motorsports wants to help prepare students for the electric vehicle industry. “A large majority of upperclassmen on the team have worked, or are working, at Tesla or Rivian.”Former Motorsports powertrain lead Levi Gershon ’23, SM ’24 recently founded CRABI Robotics — a fully autonomous marine robotic system designed to conduct in-transit cleaning of marine vessels by removing biofouling, increasing vessels’ fuel efficiency.An Indigenous approach to sustainable rocketsFirst Nations Launch, the all-Indigenous student rocket team, recently won the Grand Prize in the 2024 NASA First Nations Launch High-Power Rocket Competition. Using Indigenous methodologies, this team considers the environment in the materials and methods they employ.“The environmental impact is always something that we consider when we’re making design decisions and operational decisions. We’ve thought about things like biodegradable composites and parachutes,” says rising junior Hailey Polson, team captain. “Aerospace has been a very wasteful industry in the past. There are huge leaps and bounds being made with forward progress in regard to reusable rockets, which is definitely lowering the environmental impact.”Collecting climate change data with autonomous boatsArcturus, the recent first-place winner in design at the 16th Annual RoboBoat Competition, is developing autonomous surface vehicles that can greatly aid in marine research. “The ocean is one of our greatest resources to combat climate change; thus, the accessibility of data will help scientists understand climate patterns and predict future trends. This can help people learn how to prepare for potential disasters and how to reduce each of our carbon footprints,” says Arcturus captain and rising junior Amy Shi.“We are hoping to expand our outreach efforts to incorporate more sustainability-related programs. This can include more interactions with local students to introduce them to how engineering can make a positive impact in the climate space or other similar programs,” Shi says.Shi emphasizes that hope is a crucial force in the battle against climate change. “There are great steps being taken every day to combat this seemingly impending doom we call the climate crisis. It’s important to not give up hope, because this hope is what’s driving the leaps and bounds of innovation happening in the climate community. The mainstream media mostly reports on the negatives, but the truth is there is a lot of positive climate news every day. Being more intentional about where you seek your climate news can really help subside this feeling of doom about our planet.” More

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      in Environment

      Tracking emissions to help companies reduce their environmental footprint

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      Amidst a global wave of corporate pledges to decarbonize or reach net-zero emissions, a system for verifying actual greenhouse gas reductions has never been more important. Context Labs, founded by former MIT Sloan Fellow and serial entrepreneur Dan Harple SM ’13, is rising to meet that challenge with an analytics platform that brings more transparency to emissions data.The company’s platform adds context to data from sources like equipment sensors and satellites, provides third-party verification, and records all that information on a blockchain. Context Labs also provides an interactive view of emissions across every aspect of a company’s operations, allowing leaders to pinpoint the dirtiest parts of their business.“There’s an old adage: Unless you measure something, you can’t change it,” says Harple, who is the firm’s CEO. “I think of what we’re doing as an AI-driven digital lens into what’s happening across organizations. Our goal is to help the planet get better, faster.”Context Labs is already working with some of the largest energy companies in the world — including EQT, Williams Companies, and Coterra Energy — to verify emissions reductions. A partnership with Microsoft, announced at last year’s COP28 United Nations climate summit, allows any organization on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to integrate their sensor data into Context Lab’s platform to get a granular view of their environmental impact.Harple says the progress enables more informed sustainability initiatives at scale. He also sees the work as a way to combat overly vague statements about sustainable practices that don’t lead to actual emissions reductions, or what’s known as “greenwashing.”“Just producing data isn’t good enough, and our customers realize that, because they know even if they have good intentions to reduce emissions, no one is going to believe them,” Harple says. “One way to think about our platform is as antigreenwashing insurance, because if you get attacked for your emissions, we unbundle the data like it’s in shrink-wrap and roll it back through time on the blockchain. You can click on it and see exactly where and how it was measured, monitored, timestamped, its serial number, everything. It’s really the gold standard of proof.”An unconventional master’sHarple came to MIT as a serial founder whose companies had pioneered several foundational internet technologies, including real-time video streaming technology still used in applications like Zoom and Netflix, as well as some of the core technology for the popular Chinese microblogging website Weibo.Harple’s introduction to MIT started with a paper he wrote for his venture capital contacts in the U.S. to make the case for investment in the Netherlands, where he was living with his family. The paper caught the attention of MIT Professor Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who suggested Harple come to MIT as a Sloan Fellow to further develop his ideas about what makes a strong innovation ecosystem.Having successfully founded and exited multiple companies, Harple was not a typical MIT student when he began the Sloan Fellows program in 2011. At one point, he held a summit at MIT for a group of leading Dutch entrepreneurs and government officials that included tours of major labs and a meeting with former MIT President L. Rafael Reif.“Everyone was super enamored with MIT, and that kicked off what became a course that I started at MIT called REAL, Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab,” Harple says. REAL was eventually absorbed by what is now REAP — the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, which has worked with communities around the world.Harple describes REAL as a framework vehicle to put his theories on supporting innovation into action. Over his time at MIT, which also included collaborating with the Media Lab, he systematized those theories into what he calls pentalytics, which is a way to measure and predict the resilience of innovation ecosystems.“My sense was MIT should be analytical and data-driven,” Harple says. “The thesis I wrote was a framework for AI-driven network graph analytics. So, you can model things using analytics, and you can use AI to do predictive analytics to see where the innovation ecosystem is going to thrive.”Once Harple’s pentalytics theory was established, he wanted to put it to the test with a company. His initial idea for Context Labs was to build a verification platform to combat fake news, deepfakes, and other misinformation on the internet. Around 2018, Harple met climate investor Jeremy Grantham, who he says helped him realize the most important data are about the planet. Harple began to believe that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions estimates for things like driving a car or operating an oil rig were just that — estimates — and left room for improvement.“Our approach was very MIT-ish,” Harple says. “We said, ‘Let’s, measure it and let’s monitor it, and then let’s contextualize that data so you can never go back and say they faked it. I think there’s a lot of fakery that’s happened, and that’s why the voluntary carbon markets cratered in the last year. Our view is they cratered because the data wasn’t empirical enough.”Context Labs’ solution starts with a technology platform it calls Immutably that continuously combines disparate data streams, encrypts that information, and records it on a blockchain. Immutably also verifies the information with one or more third parties. (Context Labs has partnered with the global accounting firm KPMG.)On top of Immutably, Context Labs has built applications, including a product called Decarbonization-as-a-Service (DaaS), which uses Immutably’s data to give companies a digital twin of their entire operations. Customers can use DaaS to explore the emissions of their assets and create a certificate of verified CO2-equivalent emissions, which can be used in carbon credit markets.Putting emissions data into contextContext Labs is working with oil and gas companies, utilities, data centers, and large industrial operators, some using the platform to analyze more than 3 billion data points each day. For instance, EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., uses Context Labs to verify its lower-emission products and create carbon credits. Other customers include the nonprofits Rocky Mountain Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund.“I often get asked how big the total addressable market is,” Harple says. “My view is it’s the largest market in history. Why? Because every country needs a decarbonization plan, along with instrumentation and a digital platform to execute, as does every company.”With its headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Context Labs is also serving as a test for Harple’s pentalytics theory for innovation ecosystems. It also has operations in Houston and Amsterdam.“This company is a living lab for pentalytics,” Harple says. “I believe Kendall Square 1.0 was factory buildings, Kendall Square 2.0 is biotech, and Kendall Square 3.0 will be climate tech.” More

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      in Environment

      Scientists find a human “fingerprint” in the upper troposphere’s increasing ozone

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      Ozone can be an agent of good or harm, depending on where you find it in the atmosphere. Way up in the stratosphere, the colorless gas shields the Earth from the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays. But closer to the ground, ozone is a harmful air pollutant that can trigger chronic health problems including chest pain, difficulty breathing, and impaired lung function.And somewhere in between, in the upper troposphere — the layer of the atmosphere just below the stratosphere, where most aircraft cruise — ozone contributes to warming the planet as a potent greenhouse gas.There are signs that ozone is continuing to rise in the upper troposphere despite efforts to reduce its sources at the surface in many nations. Now, MIT scientists confirm that much of ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere is likely due to humans.In a paper appearing today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the team reports that they detected a clear signal of human influence on upper tropospheric ozone trends in a 17-year satellite record starting in 2005.“We confirm that there’s a clear and increasing trend in upper tropospheric ozone in the northern midlatitudes due to human beings rather than climate noise,” says study lead author Xinyuan Yu, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).“Now we can do more detective work and try to understand what specific human activities are leading to this ozone trend,” adds co-author Arlene Fiore, the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.The study’s MIT authors include Sebastian Eastham and Qindan Zhu, along with Benjamin Santer at the University of California at Los Angeles, Gustavo Correa of Columbia University, Jean-François Lamarque at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Jerald Zimeke at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.Ozone’s tangled webUnderstanding ozone’s causes and influences is a challenging exercise. Ozone is not emitted directly, but instead is a product of “precursors” — starting ingredients, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that react in the presence of sunlight to form ozone. These precursors are generated from vehicle exhaust, power plants, chemical solvents, industrial processes, aircraft emissions, and other human-induced activities.Whether and how long ozone lingers in the atmosphere depends on a tangle of variables, including the type and extent of human activities in a given area, as well as natural climate variability. For instance, a strong El Niño year could nudge the atmosphere’s circulation in a way that affects ozone’s concentrations, regardless of how much ozone humans are contributing to the atmosphere that year.Disentangling the human- versus climate-driven causes of ozone trend, particularly in the upper troposphere, is especially tricky. Complicating matters is the fact that in the lower troposphere — the lowest layer of the atmosphere, closest to ground level — ozone has stopped rising, and has even fallen in some regions at northern midlatitudes in the last few decades. This decrease in lower tropospheric ozone is mainly a result of efforts in North America and Europe to reduce industrial sources of air pollution.“Near the surface, ozone has been observed to decrease in some regions, and its variations are more closely linked to human emissions,” Yu notes. “In the upper troposphere, the ozone trends are less well-monitored but seem to decouple with those near the surface, and ozone is more easily influenced by climate variability. So, we don’t know whether and how much of that increase in observed ozone in the upper troposphere is attributed to humans.”A human signal amid climate noiseYu and Fiore wondered whether a human “fingerprint” in ozone levels, caused directly by human activities, could be strong enough to be detectable in satellite observations in the upper troposphere. To see such a signal, the researchers would first have to know what to look for.For this, they looked to simulations of the Earth’s climate and atmospheric chemistry. Following approaches developed in climate science, they reasoned that if they could simulate a number of possible climate variations in recent decades, all with identical human-derived sources of ozone precursor emissions, but each starting with a slightly different climate condition, then any differences among these scenarios should be due to climate noise. By inference, any common signal that emerged when averaging over the simulated scenarios should be due to human-driven causes. Such a signal, then, would be a “fingerprint” revealing human-caused ozone, which the team could look for in actual satellite observations.With this strategy in mind, the team ran simulations using a state-of-the-art chemistry climate model. They ran multiple climate scenarios, each starting from the year 1950 and running through 2014.From their simulations, the team saw a clear and common signal across scenarios, which they identified as a human fingerprint. They then looked to tropospheric ozone products derived from multiple instruments aboard NASA’s Aura satellite.“Quite honestly, I thought the satellite data were just going to be too noisy,” Fiore admits. “I didn’t expect that the pattern would be robust enough.”But the satellite observations they used gave them a good enough shot. The team looked through the upper tropospheric ozone data derived from the satellite products, from the years 2005 to 2021, and found that, indeed, they could see the signal of human-caused ozone that their simulations predicted. The signal is especially pronounced over Asia, where industrial activity has risen significantly in recent decades and where abundant sunlight and frequent weather events loft pollution, including ozone and its precursors, to the upper troposphere.Yu and Fiore are now looking to identify the specific human activities that are leading to ozone’s increase in the upper troposphere.“Where is this increasing trend coming from? Is it the near-surface emissions from combusting fossil fuels in vehicle engines and power plants? Is it the aircraft that are flying in the upper troposphere? Is it the influence of wildland fires? Or some combination of all of the above?” Fiore says. “Being able to separate human-caused impacts from natural climate variations can help to inform strategies to address climate change and air pollution.”This research was funded, in part, by NASA. More

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      in Environment

      A bright and airy hub for climate at MIT

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      Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story.A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously served as a nondescript gateway to the department’s offices, labs, and classrooms above. “It was cold and windy — probably the windiest place on campus,” EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told a packed auditorium inside the building in March. “You would pass through the elevators and disappear into the corridors, never to be seen again until the end of the day.”Van der Hilst was speaking at a dedication event to celebrate the opening of the renovated and expanded space, 60 years after the Green Building’s original dedication in 1964. In a dramatic transformation, the perpetually-shaded expanse beneath the tower has been filled with an airy, glassed-in structure that is as inviting as the previous space was forbidding.Designed to meet LEED-platinum certification, the newly-constructed Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) seems to float next to the Brutalist tower, its glass façade both opening up the interior and reflecting the sunlight and green space outside. The 300-seat auditorium within the original tower has been similarly transformed, bringing light and space to the newly dubbed Dixie Lee Bryant (1891) Lecture Hall, named after the first person to earn a geology degree at MIT.Catalyzing collaborationThe project is about more than updating an overlooked space. “The building we’re here to celebrate today does something else,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the dedication.“In its lightness, in its transparency, it calls attention not to itself, but to the people gathered inside it. In its warmth, its openness, it makes room for culture and community. And it welcomes in those who don’t yet belong … as we take on the immense challenges of climate together,” she continued, referencing the recent launch of The Climate Project at MIT — a whole-of-MIT initiative to innovate bold solutions to climate change. In MIT’s famously decentralized structure, the Moghadam Building provides a new physical hub for students, scientists, and engineers interested in climate and the environment to congregate and share ideas.From the start, fostering this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration was part of Van der Hilst’s vision. In addition to serving as the flagship location for EAPS, Building 54 has long been the administrative home of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering — a graduate program in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With the addition of Building 55, EAPS has now been joined by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) — a campus-wide program fostering education, outreach, and innovation in earth system science, urban infrastructure, and sustainability — and will welcome closer collaboration with Terrascope — a first-year learning community which invites its students to take on real-world environmental challenges.A shared vision comes to lifeThe building project dovetailed with the long-overdue refurbishment of the Green Building. After a multi-year fundraising campaign where Van der Hilst spearheaded the department’s efforts, the project received a major boost from lead donors Tina and Hamid Moghadam ’77, SM ’78, allowing the department to break ground in November 2021.In Moghadam, chair and CEO of Prologis, which owns 1.2 billion square feet of warehouses and other logistics infrastructure worldwide, EAPS found a fellow champion for climate and environmental innovation. By putting solar panels on the roofs of Prologis buildings, the company is now the second largest on-site producer of solar energy in the United States. “I don’t think there needs to be a trade-off between good sound economics and return on investment and solving climate change problems,” Moghadam said at the dedication. “The solutions that really work are the ones that actually make sense in a market economy.”Architectural firm AW-ARCH designed the Moghadam Building with a light touch, emphasizing spaciousness in contrast to the heavy concrete buildings that surround it. “The kind of delicacy and fragility of the thing is in some ways a depiction of what happens here,” said architect and co-founding partner Alex Anmahian at the dedication reception, giving a nod to the study of the delicate balance of the earth system itself. The sense is further illustrated by the responsiveness of the façade to the surrounding environment, which, depending on the time of day and quality of light, makes the glass alternately reflective and transparent.Inside, the 11,900-square foot pavilion is highly flexible and serves as a showcase for the science that happens in the labs and offices above. Central to the space is a 16-foot by 9-foot video wall featuring vivid footage of field work, lab research, data visualizations, and natural phenomena — visible even to passers-by outside. The video wall is counterposed to an unpretentious set of stair-step bleachers leading to the second floor that could play host to anything from a scientific lecture to a community pizza-and-movie night.Van der Hilst has referred to his vision for the atrium as a “campus living room,” and the furniture throughout is intentionally chosen to allow for impromptu rearrangements, providing a valuable public space on campus for students to work and socialize.The second level is similarly adaptable, featuring three classrooms with state-of-the-art teaching technologies that can be transformed from a single large space for a hackathon to intimate rooms for discussion.“The space is really meant for a yet unforeseen experience,” Anmahian says. “The reason it is so open is to allow for any possibility.”The inviting, dynamic design of the pavilion has also become an instant point of pride for the building’s inhabitants. At the dedication, School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala quipped that anyone walking into the space “gains two inches in height.”Van der Hilst quoted a colleague with a similar observation: “Now, when I come into this space, I feel respected by it.”The perfect complementAnother significant feature of the project is the List Visual Arts Center Percent-for-Art Program installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, entitled “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.”Consisting of three interrelated works, the commission includes: “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” three glacial erratic boulders which sit atop their own core samples in the surrounding green space; “We Are All Astronauts,” a trio of glass pillars containing vintage globes with distinctions between nations, land, and sea removed; and “Pure Waste,” a synthetic diamond embedded in the foundation, created from carbon captured from the air and the breath of researchers who work in the building.Known for themes that explore the transformation of the natural world over time and humanity’s complex relationship with our environment, Charrière was a perfect fit to complement the new Building 55 — offering a thought-provoking perspective on our current environmental challenges while underscoring the value of the research that happens within its walls. 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      in Environment

      Researchers return to Arctic to test integrated sensor nodes

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      Shimmering ice extends in all directions as far as the eye can see. Air temperatures plunge to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and colder with wind chills. Ocean currents drag large swaths of ice floating at sea. Polar bears, narwhals, and other iconic Arctic species roam wild.For a week this past spring, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan called this place — drifting some 200 nautical miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the frozen Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Circle — home. Two ice runways for small aircraft provided their only way in and out of this remote wilderness; heated tents provided their only shelter from the bitter cold.

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      Video: MIT Lincoln Laboratory

      Here, in the northernmost region on Earth, Evans and Whelihan joined other groups conducting fieldwork in the Arctic as part of Operation Ice Camp (OIC) 2024, an operational exercise run by the U.S. Navy’s Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL). Riding on snowmobiles and helicopters, the duo deployed a small set of integrated sensor nodes that measure everything from atmospheric conditions to ice properties to the structure of water deep below the surface.Ultimately, they envision deploying an unattended network of these low-cost sensor nodes across the Arctic to increase scientific understanding of the trending loss in sea ice extent and thickness. Warming much faster than the rest of the world, the Arctic is a ground zero for climate change, with cascading impacts across the planet that include rising sea levels and extreme weather. Openings in the sea ice cover, or leads, are concerning not only for climate change but also for global geopolitical competition over transit routes and natural resources. A synoptic view of the physical processes happening above, at, and below sea ice is key to determining why the ice is diminishing. In turn, this knowledge can help predict when and where fractures will occur, to inform planning and decision-making.Winter “camp”Every two years, OIC, previously called Ice Exercise (ICEX), provides a way for the international community to access the Arctic for operational readiness exercises and scientific research, with the focus switching back and forth; this year’s focus was scientific research. Coordination, planning, and execution of the month-long operation is led by ASL, a division of the U.S. Navy’s Undersea Warfighting Development Center responsible for ensuring the submarine force can effectively operate in the Arctic Ocean.Making this inhospitable and unforgiving environment safe for participants takes considerable effort. The critical first step is determining where to set up camp. In the weeks before the first participants arrived for OIC 2024, ASL — with assistance from the U.S. National Ice Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and UIC Science — flew over large sheets of floating ice (ice floes) identified via satellite imagery, landed on some they thought might be viable sites, and drilled through the ice to check its thickness. The ice floe must not only be large enough to accommodate construction of a camp and two runways but also feature both multiyear ice and first-year ice. Multiyear ice is thick and strong but rough, making it ideal for camp setup, while the smooth but thinner first-year ice is better suited for building runways. Once the appropriate ice floe was selected, ASL began to haul in equipment and food, build infrastructure like lodging and a command center, and fly in a small group before fully operationalizing the site. They also identified locations near the camp for two Navy submarines to surface through the ice.The more than 200 participants represented U.S. and allied forces and scientists from research organizations and universities. Distinguished visitors from government offices also attended OIC to see the unique Arctic environment and unfolding challenges firsthand.“Our ASL hosts do incredible work to build this camp from scratch and keep us alive,” Evans says.Evans and Whelihan, part of the laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group, first trekked to the Arctic in March 2022 for ICEX 2022. (The laboratory in general has been participating since 2016 in these events, the first iteration of which occurred in 1946.) There, they deployed a suite of commercial off-the-shelf sensors for detecting acoustic (sound) and seismic (vibration) events created by ice fractures or collisions, and for measuring salinity, temperature, and pressure in the water below the ice. They also deployed a prototype fiber-based temperature sensor array developed by the laboratory and research partners for precisely measuring temperature across the entire water column at one location, and a University of New Hampshire (UNH)−supplied echosounder to investigate the different layers present in the water column. In this maiden voyage, their goals were to assess how these sensors fared in the harsh Arctic conditions and to collect a dataset from which characteristic signatures of ice-fracturing events could begin to be identified. These events would be correlated with weather and water conditions to eventually offer a predictive capability.“We saw real phenomenology in our data,” Whelihan says. “But, we’re not ice experts. What we’re good at here at the laboratory is making and deploying sensors. That’s our place in the world of climate science: to be a data provider. In fact, we hope to open source all of our data this year so that ice scientists can access and analyze them and then we can make enhanced sensors and collect more data.”Interim iceIn the two years since that expedition, they and their colleagues have been modifying their sensor designs and deployment strategies. As Evans and Whelihan learned at ICEX 2022, to be resilient in the Arctic, a sensor must not only be kept warm and dry during deployment but also be deployed in a way to prevent breaking. Moreover, sufficient power and data links are needed to collect and access sensor data.“We can make cold-weather electronics, no problem,” Whelihan says. “The two drivers are operating the sensors in an energy-starved environment — the colder it is, the worse batteries perform — and keeping them from getting destroyed when ice floes crash together as leads in the ice open up.”Their work in the interim to OIC 2024 involved integrating the individual sensors into hardened sensor nodes and practicing deploying these nodes in easier-to-access locations. To facilitate incorporating additional sensors into a node, Whelihan spearheaded the development of an open-source, easily extensible hardware and software architecture.In March 2023, the Lincoln Laboratory team deployed three sensor nodes for a week on Huron Bay off Lake Superior through Michigan Tech’s Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC). Engineers from GLRC helped the team safely set up an operations base on the ice. They demonstrated that the sensor integration worked, and the sensor nodes proved capable of surviving for at least a week in relatively harsh conditions. The researchers recorded seismic activity on all three nodes, corresponding to some ice breaking further up the bay.“Proving our sensor node in an Arctic surrogate environment provided a stepping stone for testing in the real Arctic,” Evans says.Evans then received an invitation from Ignatius Rigor, the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP), to join him on an upcoming trip to Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, and deploy one of their seismic sensor nodes on the ice there (with support from UIC Science). The IABP maintains a network of Arctic buoys equipped with meteorological and oceanic sensors. Data collected by these buoys are shared with the operational and research communities to support real-time operations (e.g., forecasting sea ice conditions for coastal Alaskans) and climate research. However, these buoys are typically limited in the frequency at which they collect data, so phenomenology on shorter time scales important to climate change may be missed. Moreover, these buoys are difficult and expensive to deploy because they are designed to survive in the harshest environments for years at a time.  The laboratory-developed sensor nodes could offer an inexpensive, easier-to-deploy option for collecting more data over shorter periods of time. In April 2023, Evans placed a sensor node in Utqiaġvik on landfast sea ice, which is stationary ice anchored to the seabed just off the coast. During the sensor node’s week-long deployment, a big piece of drift ice (ice not attached to the seabed or other fixed object) broke off and crashed into the landfast ice. The event was recorded by a radar maintained by the University of Alaska Fairbanks that monitors sea ice movement in near real time to warn of any instability. Though this phenomenology is not exactly the same as that expected for Arctic sea ice, the researchers were encouraged to see seismic activity recorded by their sensor node.In December 2023, Evans and Whelihan headed to New Hampshire, where they conducted echosounder testing in UNH’s engineering test tank and on the Piscataqua River. Together with their UNH partners, they sought to determine whether a low-cost, hobby-grade echosounder could detect the same phenomenology of interest as the high-fidelity UNH echosounder, which would be far too costly to deploy in sensor nodes across the Arctic. In the test tank and on the river, the low-cost echosounder proved capable of detecting masses of water moving in the water column, but with considerably less structural detail than afforded by the higher-cost option. Seeing such dynamics is important to inferring where water comes from and understanding how it affects sea ice breakup — for example, how warm water moving in from the Pacific Ocean is coming into contact with and melting the ice. So, the laboratory researchers and UNH partners have been building a medium-fidelity, medium-cost echosounder.In January 2024, Evans and Whelihan — along with Jehan Diaz, a fellow staff member in their research group — returned to GLRC. With logistical support from their GLRC hosts, they snowmobiled across the ice on Portage Lake, where they practiced several activities to prepare for OIC 2024: augering (drilling) six-inch holes in the ice, albeit in thinner ice than that in the Arctic; placing their long, pipe-like sensor nodes through these holes; operating cold-hardened drones to interact with the nodes; and retrieving the nodes. They also practiced sensor calibration by hitting the ice with an iron bar some distance away from the nodes and correlating this distance with the resulting measured acoustic and seismic intensity.“Our time at GLRC helped us mitigate a lot of risks and prepare to deploy these complex systems in the Arctic,” Whelihan says.Arctic againTo get to OIC, Evans and Whelihan first flew to Prudhoe Bay and reacclimated to the frigid temperatures. They spent the next two days at the Deadhorse Aviation Center hangar inspecting their equipment for transit-induced damage, which included squashed cables and connectors that required rejiggering.“That’s part of the adventure story,” Evans says. “Getting stuff to Prudhoe Bay is not your standard shipping; it’s ice-road trucking.”From there, they boarded a small aircraft to the ice camp.“Even though this trip marked our second time coming here, it was still disorienting,” Evans continues. “You land in the middle of nowhere on a small aircraft after a couple-hour flight. You get out bundled in all of your Arctic gear in this remote, pristine environment.”After unloading and rechecking their equipment for any damage, calibrating their sensors, and attending safety briefings, they were ready to begin their experiments.An icy situationInside the project tent, Evans and Whelihan deployed the UNH-supplied echosounder and a suite of ground-truth sensors on an automated winch to profile water conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD). Echosounder data needed to be validated with associated CTD data to determine the source of the water in the water column. Ocean properties change as a function of depth, and these changes are important to capture, in part because masses of water coming in from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans arrive at different depths. Though masses of warm water have always existed, climate change–related mechanisms are now bringing them into contact with the ice.  “As ice breaks up, wind can directly interact with the ocean because it’s lacking that barrier of ice cover,” Evans explains. “Kinetic energy from the wind causes mixing in the ocean; all the warm water that used to stay at depth instead gets brought up and interacts with the ice.”They also deployed four of their sensor nodes several miles outside of camp. To access this deployment site, they rode on a sled pulled via a snowmobile driven by Ann Hill, an ASL field party leader trained in Arctic survival and wildlife encounters. The temperature that day was -55 F. At such a dangerously cold temperature, frostnip and frostbite are all too common. To avoid removal of gloves or other protective clothing, the researchers enabled the nodes with WiFi capability (the nodes also have a satellite communications link to transmit low-bandwidth data). Large amounts of data are automatically downloaded over WiFi to an arm-wearable haptic (touch-based) system when a user walks up to a node.“It was so cold that the holes we were drilling in the ice to reach the water column were freezing solid,” Evans explains. “We realized it was going to be quite an ordeal to get our sensor nodes out of the ice.”So, after drilling a big hole in the ice, they deployed only one central node with all the sensor components: a commercial echosounder, an underwater microphone, a seismometer, and a weather station. They deployed the other three nodes, each with a seismometer and weather station, atop the ice.“One of our design considerations was flexibility,” Whelihan says. “Each node can integrate as few or as many sensors as desired.”The small sensor array was only collecting data for about a day when Evans and Whelihan, who were at the time on a helicopter, saw that their initial field site had become completely cut off from camp by a 150-meter-wide ice lead. They quickly returned to camp to load the tools needed to pull the nodes, which were no longer accessible by snowmobile. Two recently arrived staff members from the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies offered to help them retrieve their nodes. The helicopter landed on the ice floe near a crack, and the pilot told them they had half an hour to complete their recovery mission. By the time they had retrieved all four sensors, the crack had increased from thumb to fist size.“When we got home, we analyzed the collected sensor data and saw a spike in seismic activity corresponding to what could be the major ice-fracturing event that necessitated our node recovery mission,” Whelihan says.  The researchers also conducted experiments with their Arctic-hardened drones to evaluate their utility for retrieving sensor node data and to develop concepts of operations for future capabilities.“The idea is to have some autonomous vehicle land next to the node, download data, and come back, like a data mule, rather than having to expend energy getting data off the system, say via high-speed satellite communications,” Whelihan says. “We also started testing whether the drone is capable on its own of finding sensors that are constantly moving and getting close enough to them. Even flying in 25-mile-per-hour winds, and at very low temperatures, the drone worked well.”Aside from carrying out their experiments, the researchers had the opportunity to interact with other participants. Their “roommates” were ice scientists from Norway and Finland. They met other ice and water scientists conducting chemistry experiments on the salt content of ice taken from different depths in the ice sheet (when ocean water freezes, salt tends to get pushed out of the ice). One of their collaborators — Nicholas Schmerr, an ice seismologist from the University of Maryland — placed high-quality geophones (for measuring vibrations in the ice) alongside their nodes deployed on the camp field site. They also met with junior enlisted submariners, who temporarily came to camp to open up spots on the submarine for distinguished visitors.“Part of what we’ve been doing over the last three years is building connections within the Arctic community,” Evans says. “Every time I start to get a handle on the phenomenology that exists out here, I learn something new. For example, I didn’t know that sometimes a layer of ice forms a little bit deeper than the primary ice sheet, and you can actually see fish swimming in between the layers.”“One day, we were out with our field party leader, who saw fog while she was looking at the horizon and said the ice was breaking up,” Whelihan adds. “I said, ‘Wait, what?’ As she explained, when an ice lead forms, fog comes out of the ocean. Sure enough, within 30 minutes, we had quarter-mile visibility, whereas beforehand it was unlimited.”Back to solid groundBefore leaving, Whelihan and Evans retrieved and packed up all the remaining sensor nodes, adopting the “leave no trace” philosophy of preserving natural places.“Only a limited number of people get access to this special environment,” Whelihan says. “We hope to grow our footprint at these events in future years, giving opportunities to other laboratory staff members to attend.”In the meantime, they will analyze the collected sensor data and refine their sensor node design. One design consideration is how to replenish the sensors’ battery power. A potential path forward is to leverage the temperature difference between water and air, and harvest energy from the water currents moving under ice floes. Wind energy may provide another viable solution. Solar power would only work for part of the year because the Arctic Circle undergoes periods of complete darkness.The team is also seeking external sponsorship to continue their work engineering sensing systems that advance the scientific community’s understanding of changes to Arctic ice; this work is currently funded through Lincoln Laboratory’s internally administered R&D portfolio on climate change. And, in learning more about this changing environment and its critical importance to strategic interests, they are considering other sensing problems that they could tackle using their Arctic engineering expertise.“The Arctic is becoming a more visible and important region because of how it’s changing,” Evans concludes. “Going forward as a country, we must be able to operate there.” More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: “As long as you have a future, you can still change it”

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      Tristan Brown is the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor at MIT. He specializes in law, science, environment and religion of late imperial China, a period running from the 16th through early 20th centuries.In this Q&A, Brown discusses how his areas of historical research can be useful for examining today’s pressing environmental challenges. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.Q: Why does this era of Chinese history resonate so much for you? How is it relevant to contemporary times and challenges?A: China has always been interesting to historians because it has a long-recorded history, with data showing how people have coped with environmental and climate changes over the centuries. We have tons of records of various kinds of ecological issues, environmental crises, and the associated outbreaks of calamities, famine, epidemics, and warfare. Historians of China have a lot to offer ongoing conversations about climate.More specifically, I research conflicts over land and resources that erupted when China was undergoing huge environmental, economic, demographic, and political pressures, and the role that feng shui played as local communities and the state tried to mediate those conflicts. [Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice combining cosmology, spatial aesthetics, and measurement to divine the right balance between the natural and built environment.] Ultimately, the Qing (1644-1912) state was unable to manage these conflicts, and feng shui–based attempts to make decisions about conserving or exploiting certain areas blew up by the end of the 19th century in the face of pressures to industrialize. This is the subject of my first book, “Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China.”Q: Can you give a sense of how feng shui was used to determine outcomes in environmental cases?A: We tend to think of feng shui as a popular design mechanism today. While this isn’t completely inaccurate, there was much more to it than that in Chinese history, when it evolved over many centuries. Specifically, there are lots of insights in feng shui that reflect the ways in which people recorded the natural world, explained how components in the environment related to one another, and understood why and how bad things happened. There is an interesting concept in feng shui that your environment affects your health,and specifically your children’s (i.e., descendants and progeny) health. That concept is found across premodern feng shui literature and is one of fundamental principles of the whole knowledge system.During the period I research, the Qing, the primary fuel energy sources in China came from timber and coal. There were legal cases where communities argued against efforts to mine a local mountain, saying that it could injure the feng shui (i.e., undermine the cosmological balance of natural forces and spatial integrity) of a mountain and hurt the fortunes of an entire region. People were suspicious of coal mining in their communities. They had seen or heard about mines collapsing and flooded mine shafts, they had watched runoff ruin good farmland, causing crops to fail, and even perhaps children to fall ill. Coal mining disturbed the human-earth connection, and thus the relationship between people and nature. People invoked feng shui to express an idea that the extraction of rocks and minerals from the land can have detrimental effects on living communities. Whether out of a sincere community-based concern or out of a more self-interested NIMBYism, feng shui was the primary discourse invoked in these cases.Not all efforts to conserve areas from mining succeeded, especially as foreign imperialism encroached on China, threatening government and local control over the economy. It became gradually clear to China’s elites that the country had to industrialize to survive, and this involved the difficult and even violent process of taking people from farm work and bringing them to cities, building railways, cutting millions of trees, and mining coal to power it all.Q: This makes it seem as if the Chinese swept away feng shui whenever it presented a hurdle, putting the country on the path to coal dependence, pollution, and a carbon-emitting future.A: Feng shui has not disappeared in China, but there’s no doubt about it that development in the form of industrialization took precedence in the 20th century, when it became officially labelled a “superstition” on the national stage. When I first went to China in 2007, city air was so polluted I couldn’t see the horizon. I was 18 years old and the air in some northern cities like Shijiazhuang honestly felt scary. I’ve returned many times since then, of course, and there has been great improvement in air quality, because the government made it a priority.Feng shui is a future-oriented knowledge, concerned with identifying events that have happened in the past that are related to things happening today, and using that information to influence future events. As Richard Smith of Rice University argues, Chinese have used history to order the past, ritual to order the present, and divination to order the future. Consider, for instance, Xiong’an, a new development area outside of Beijing that is physically marking the era of Xi Jinping’s tenure as paramount leader. As soon as the site was selected, people in China started talking about its feng shui, both out of potential environmental concerns and as a subtle form of political commentary. MIT’s own Sol Andrew Stokols in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) has a fantastic new dissertation examining that new area.In short, the feng shui masters of old said there will be floods and droughts and bad stuff happening in the future if a course correction isn’t made. But at the same time, in feng shui there’s never a situation that is hopeless; there is no lost cause. So, there is optimism in the knowledge and rhetoric of feng shui that I think might be applicable as time goes on with climate change. As long as you have a future, you can still change it. Q: In 2023, you were awarded one of the first grants of MIT’s Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with seeing through the Institute’s climate action plan over the decade. What have you been up to courtesy of this fund?A: Well, it all started years ago, when I started thinking about great number of mountains in China associated with Buddhism or Daoism that have become national parks in recent decades. Some of these mountains host trees and plant species that are not found in any other part of China. For my grant, I wanted to find out how these mountains have managed to incubate such rare species for the last 2,000 years. And it’s not as simple as just saying, well, Buddhism, right? Because there are plenty of Buddhist mountains that have not fared as well ecologically. The religious landscape is part of the answer, but there’s also all the messiness of material history that surrounds such a mountain.With this grant, I am bringing together a group of scholars of religion, historians, as well as engineers working in conservation ecology, and we’re trying to figure out what makes some of these places religiously and environmentally distinctive. People come to the project with different approaches. My MIT colleague Serguei Saavedra in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering uses new models in system ecology to measure the resilience of environments under various stresses. My colleague in religious studies, Or Porath at Tel Aviv University, is asking when and how Asian religions have centered — or ignored — animals and animal welfare. Another collaboration with MIT’s Siqi Zheng in DUSP and Wen-Chi Liao at the National University of Singapore is looking at how we can use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and classical feng shui manuals to teach computers how to analyze the value of a property’s feng shui in Sinophone communities around the world. There’s a lot going on!Q: How do you bring China’s unique environmental history and law into your classroom, and make it immediate and relevant to the world students face today?A: History is always part of the answer. I mean, whether it’s for an economist, a political scientist, or an architect, history matters. Likewise, when you’re confronting climate change and all these struggles regarding the environment and various crises involving ecosystems, it’s always a good idea to look at how human beings in the past dealt with similar crises. It doesn’t give you a prediction on what would happen in the future, but it gives you some range of possibilities, many of which may at first appear counterintuitive or surprising.That’s exactly what the humanities do. My job is to make MIT undergraduates care about a people who are no longer alive, who walked the earth a thousand years ago, who confronted terrible times of conflict and hunger. Sometimes these people left behind a written record about their world, and sometimes they didn’t. But we try to hear them out regardless. I want students to develop empathy for these strangers and wonder what it would be like to walk in their shoes. Every one of those people is someone’s ancestor, and they very well could have been your ancestor.In my class 21H.186 (Nature and Environment in China), we look at the historical precedents that might be useful for today’s environmental challenges, ranging from urban pollution or domestic recycling systems. The fact we’re still here to ask historical questions is itself significant. When we feel despair about climate change, we can ask, “How did individuals endure the changed course of the Yellow River or the Little Ice Age?” Even when it is recording tragedies, history can be understood as an enduring form of hope.  More

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      in Environment

      Mission directors announced for the Climate Project at MIT

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      The Climate Project at MIT has appointed leaders for each of its six focal areas, or Climate Missions, President Sally Kornbluth announced in a letter to the MIT community today.Introduced in February, the Climate Project at MIT is a major new effort to change the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better over the next decade. The project will focus MIT’s strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed. The mission directors in these fields, representing diverse areas of expertise, will collaborate with faculty and researchers across MIT, as well as each other, to accelerate solutions that address climate change.“The mission directors will be absolutely central as the Climate Project seeks to marshal the Institute’s talent and resources to research, develop, deploy and scale up serious solutions to help change the planet’s climate trajectory,” Kornbluth wrote in her letter, adding: “To the faculty members taking on these pivotal roles: We could not be more grateful for your skill and commitment, or more enthusiastic about what you can help us all achieve, together.”The Climate Project will expand and accelerate MIT’s efforts to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and respond to climate effects such as extreme heat, rising sea levels, and reduced crop yields. At the urgent pace needed, the project will help the Institute create new external collaborations and deepen existing ones to develop and scale climate solutions.The Institute has pledged an initial $75 million to the project, including $25 million from the MIT Sloan School of Management to launch a complementary effort, the new MIT Climate Policy Center. MIT has more than 300 faculty and senior researchers already working on climate issues, in collaboration with their students and staff. The Climate Project at MIT builds on their work and the Institute’s 2021 “Fast Forward” climate action plan.Richard Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities and the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has led the Climate Project’s formation; MIT will shortly hire a vice president for climate to oversee the project. The six Climate Missions and the new mission directors are as follows:Decarbonizing energy and industryThis mission supports advances in the electric power grid as well as the transition across all industry — including transportation, computing, heavy production, and manufacturing — to low-emissions pathways.The mission director is Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07, who is MIT’s associate dean of engineering, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, and a professor of materials science and engineering since 2014.Olivetti analyzes and improves the environmental sustainability of materials throughout the life cycle and across the supply chain, by linking physical and chemical processes to systems impact. She researches materials design and synthesis using natural language processing, builds models of material supply and technology demand, and assesses the potential for recovering value from industrial waste through experimental approaches. Olivetti has experience building partnerships across the Institute and working with industry to implement large-scale climate solutions through her role as co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and as faculty lead for PAIA, an industry consortium on the carbon footprinting of computing.Restoring the atmosphere, protecting the land and oceansThis mission is centered on removing or storing greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, and on protecting ocean and land ecosystems, including food and water systems.MIT has chosen two mission directors: Andrew Babbin and Jesse Kroll. The two bring together research expertise from two critical domains of the Earth system, oceans and the atmosphere, as well as backgrounds in both the science and engineering underlying our understanding of Earth’s climate. As co-directors, they jointly link MIT’s School of Science and School of Engineering in this domain.Babbin is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate. He is a marine biogeochemist whose specialty is studying the carbon and nitrogen cycle of the oceans, work that is related to evaluating the ocean’s capacity for carbon storage, an essential element of this mission’s work. He has been at MIT since 2017.Kroll is a professor in MIT’s Department of of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemical engineering, and the director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory. He is a chemist who studies organic compounds and particulate matter in the atmosphere, in order to better understand how perturbations to the atmosphere, both intentional and unintentional, can affect air pollution and climate.Empowering frontline communitiesThis mission focuses on the development of new climate solutions in support of the world’s most vulnerable populations, in areas ranging from health effects to food security, emergency planning, and risk forecasting.The mission director is Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism in MIT’s Department of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, and director of MIT’s Urban Risk Lab. Mazereeuw researches disaster resilience, climate change, and coastal strategies. Her lab has engaged in design projects ranging from physical objects to software, while exploring methods of engaging communities and governments in preparedness efforts, skills she brings to bear on building strong collaborations with a broad range of stakeholders.Mazereeuw is also co-lead of one of the five projects selected in MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges competition in 2022, an effort to help communities prepare by understanding the risk of extreme weather events for specific locations.Building and adapting healthy, resilient citiesA majority of the world’s population lives in cities, so urban design and planning is a crucial part of climate work, involving transportation, infrastructure, finance, government, and more.Christoph Reinhart, the Alan and Terri Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate and director of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the School of Architecture and Planning, is the mission director in this area. The Sustainable Design Lab that Reinhart founded when he joined MIT in 2012 has launched several technology startups, including Mapdwell Solar System, now part of Palmetto Clean Technology, as well as Solemma, makers of an environmental building design software used in architectural practice and education worldwide. Reinhart’s online course on Sustainable Building Design has an enrollment of over 55,000 individuals and forms part of MIT’s XSeries Program in Future Energy Systems.Inventing new policy approachesClimate change is a unique crisis. With that in mind, this mission aims to develop new institutional structures and incentives — in carbon markets, finance, trade policy, and more — along with decision support tools and systems for scaling up climate efforts.Christopher Knittel brings extensive knowledge of these topics to the mission director role. The George P. Shultz Professor and Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Knittel has produced high-impact research in multiple areas; his studies on emissions and the automobile industry have evaluated fuel-efficiency standards, changes in vehicle fuel efficiency, market responses to fuel-price changes, and the health impact of automobiles.Beyond that, Knittel has also studied the impact of the energy transition on jobs, conducted high-level evaluations of climate policies, and examined energy market structures. He joined the MIT faculty in 2011. He also serves as the director of the MIT Climate Policy Center, which will work closely with all six missions.Wild cardsThis mission consists of what the Climate Project at MIT calls “unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions,” and will have a broad portfolio for innovation.While all the missions will be charged with encouraging unorthodox approaches within their domains, this mission will seek out unconventional solutions outside the scope of the others, and has a broad mandate for promoting them.The mission director in this case is Benedetto Marelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Marelli’s research group develops biopolymers and bioinspired materials with reduced environmental impact compared to traditional technologies. He engages with research at multiple scales, including nanofabrication, and the research group has conducted extensive work on food security and safety while exploring new techniques to reduce waste through enhanced food preservation and to precisely deliver agrochemicals in plants and in soil.As Lester and other MIT leaders have noted, the Climate Project at MIT is still being shaped, and will have the flexibility to accommodate a wide range of projects, partnerships, and approaches needed for thoughtful, fast-moving change. By filling out the leadership structure, today’s announcement is a major milestone in making the project operational.In addition to the six Climate Missions, the Climate Project at MIT includes Climate Frontier Projects, which are efforts launched by these missions, and a Climate HQ, which will support fundamental research, education, and outreach, as well as new resources to connect research to the practical work of climate response. More

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      in Environment

      China-based emissions of three potent climate-warming greenhouse gases spiked in past decade

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      When it comes to heating up the planet, not all greenhouse gases are created equal. They vary widely in their global warming potential (GWP), a measure of how much infrared thermal radiation a greenhouse gas would absorb over a given time frame once it enters the atmosphere. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWPs of a class of greenhouse gases known as perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are thousands of times that of CO2. The lifespans in the atmosphere of different greenhouse gases also vary widely. Methane persists in the atmosphere for around 10 years; CO2 for over 100 years, and PFCs for up to tens of thousands of years.Given the high GWPs and lifespans of PFCs, their emissions could pose a major roadblock to achieving the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — to limit the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, two new studies based on atmospheric observations inside China and high-resolution atmospheric models show a rapid rise in Chinese emissions over the last decade (2011 to 2020 or 2021) of three PFCs: tetrafluoromethane (PFC-14) and hexafluoroethane (PFC-116) (results in PNAS), and perfluorocyclobutane (PFC-318) (results in Environmental Science & Technology).Both studies find that Chinese emissions have played a dominant role in driving up global emission levels for all three PFCs.The PNAS study identifies substantial PFC-14 and PFC-116 emission sources in the less-populated western regions of China from 2011 to 2021, likely due to the large amount of aluminum industry in these regions. The semiconductor industry also contributes to some of the emissions detected in the more economically developed eastern regions. These emissions are byproducts from aluminum smelting, or occur during the use of the two PFCs in the production of semiconductors and flat panel displays. During the observation period, emissions of both gases in China rose by 78 percent, accounting for most of the increase in global emissions of these gases.The ES&T study finds that during 2011-20, a 70 percent increase in Chinese PFC-318 emissions (contributing more than half of the global emissions increase of this gas) — originated primarily in eastern China. The regions with high emissions of PFC-318 in China overlap with geographical areas densely populated with factories that produce polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, commonly used for nonstick cookware coatings), implying that PTFE factories are major sources of PFC-318 emissions in China. In these factories, PFC-318 is formed as a byproduct.“Using atmospheric observations from multiple monitoring sites, we not only determined the magnitudes of PFC emissions, but also pinpointed the possible locations of their sources,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS), and corresponding author of both studies. “Identifying the actual source industries contributing to these PFC emissions, and understanding the reasons for these largely byproduct emissions, can provide guidance for developing region- or industry-specific mitigation strategies.”“These three PFCs are largely produced as unwanted byproducts during the manufacture of otherwise widely used industrial products,” says MIT professor of atmospheric sciences Ronald Prinn, director of both the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and CGCS, and a co-author of both studies. “Phasing out emissions of PFCs as early as possible is highly beneficial for achieving global climate mitigation targets and is likely achievable by recycling programs and targeted technological improvements in these industries.”Findings in both studies were obtained, in part, from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, as reported in the latest United Nations Environment Program and World Meteorological Organization Ozone Assessment report. More