Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Disrupting Desalination: Novel Energy Efficient Technologies For Hypersaline Brines, Ngai Yin Yip

Sustainability Seminar Series

Management and treatment of hypersaline brines, e.g., produced water from oil and gas extraction, zero liquid discharge effluent, and flue gas desulfurization wastewater, are of growing environmental importance. Prevailing practice of distilling brines is highly energy-intensive and costly because the evaporation of water is enthalpically unfavorable. Here, we present two novel technologies for hypersaline desalination: cascading osmotically mediated reverse osmosis (COMRO) and temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE). The first technology, COMRO, utilizes the novel design of bilateral countercurrent reverse osmosis stages to lessening the osmotic pressure difference across the membrane, thereby simultaneously depressing the hydraulic pressure needed and reducing energy …

Incentives For Coastal Persistence, Porter Hoagland

Sustainability Seminar Series

Inundation, erosion, and property damages and losses are being observed at increasing rates in coastal areas. It is now well-recognized that rising sea levels, increases in storm intensities, and inadequate structural protections are contributing to the significant physical destruction of and economic losses to coastal properties. Scientists, coastal zone managers, and the general public have begun to call for implementing policies of resilience and adaptation to these losses, including retreating from the coast, yet humans continue to live—and even increase their presence—along the nation’s shorelines. What causes such persistence? It has become commonplace to identify lower-than-actuarially-fair premiums for participation in …

How Do Polar Ice Sheets And Sea Level Behave Under A Changing Climate?, Sandra Passchier

Sustainability Seminar Series

Nearly 3 billion people live within 100 km of the coastline, many in large urban centers. In predictions of sea level rise, the future role of polar ice sheets is one of the most critical uncertainties under the present extreme rise in greenhouse forcing of the climate system. This talk will show how geoscientists address the Earth system processes involved in melting ice sheets under warmer climates, and introduce the objectives of an upcoming deepsea drilling expedition to the area with greatest ice loss in West Antarctica.

The Fate Of Sulfur During Melting And Crystallization: Implications For Sulfur Transfer From Mantle To The Crust-Atmosphere System, Shuo Ding

Sustainability Seminar Series

Sulfur (S) is one of the most abundant volatiles; one that has a fundamental impact on various magmatic processes, from the mantle to the Earth’s surface. Ocean island basalts (OIB) are one of the critical probes for understanding the chemical, lithological and thermal variations in the Earth’s mantle. Therefore, S abundances of primary OIB that sample peridotite partial melts, as well as deeply recycled components, can provide a better understanding of the long-term S cycle on Earth. In this study, we developed a model to describe the behavior of sulfide and copper (Cu) during decompression melting of the mantle by …

Tracking Soil Signatures Of The 16 Mile Fire, Delaware State Forest, Pa, Jennifer Callanan

Sustainability Seminar Series

The high intensity 16 Mile Fire that burned in the Delaware State Forest, PA was not typical in forests of this region. This study tracks the chemical signature in the soil as a result of the combustion of biomass and associated ash inputs. Chemical signatures related directly to the fire impacted soils were observed, with some remaining after one year’s time. These lasting signatures may influence the future structure of the forest. The results of this study begin to address implications of high intensity fire in forests of the northeast as changing climatic conditions may begin to influence their fire …

Emerging Models Of Nitrogen And Carbon Cycling In Engineered Wastewater Treatment Processes, Kartik Chandran

Sustainability Seminar Series

The engineered nitrogen cycle provides a rich framework to study the structure, function and interactions within mixed microbial communities. The knowledge objtained from such studies also allows us to harness the potential of such communities towards achieving multiple goals including the production of clean water, treatment of drinking water and the synthesis of commodity chemicals and fuels, among others. Within the spectrum of engineered nitrogen cycling processes, autotrophic biological nitrogen removal (BNR) offers an energy and resource efficient alternate to conventionally followed approaches. The successful implementation of autotrophic BNR processes is contingent upon the selective retention of aerobic and anaerobic …

The Role Of Ground-Source Heat Pumps In Achieving New Jersey’S 80% By 2050 Goal: Addressing Emissions From The Buildings Sector, Sheryl Tembe

Sustainability Seminar Series

Emissions reduction and renewable energy sources are vital to health of New Jersey. Governor Murphy’s executive orders and recent legislation target actions to improve our environment and create a sustainable future. The buildings sector is recognized as the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in New Jersey behind transportation, with the majority of emissions due to fossil fuel-based heating and cooling. To reach state’s goal of 80% emissions reduction by 2050, reduction strategies for the built environment must implement technologies that displace fossil fuels and maximize clean and low-carbon electricity. Heat pumps are a key technology because of their …

Reactive Iron Mineral Coatings In Redox Transition Zones And Their Impact On Natural Attenuation, Lisa Axe

Sustainability Seminar Series

Reactive Fe mineral coatings play an important role in contaminant attenuation in redox transition zones at sites with subsurface contamination. An anaerobic 60 foot core was collected from the Chambers Works Site in Deepwater, NJ. Working in a glovebox, two-inch subsamples were used to evaluate redox transition zones using bulk composition, redox potential, pH, VOCs in the headspace, as well as abundant bacteria. A number of redox transition zones were identified and further studied with a suite of complementary analyses to characterize the surface chemistry. Analyses have included sequential extraction (phases and speciation), x-ray diffraction (mineralogy), x-ray fluorescence (composition), fieldemission …

Growing A Sustainable City: The Question Of Urban Agriculture, Hamil Pearsall

Sustainability Seminar Series

This presentation examines urban agriculture in Philadelphia and highlights the challenges of institutionalizing this historically informal urban activity into formal city policy over the last two decades. Urban agriculture has become a symbol of Philadelphia’s economic revitalization, sustainability, and increasingly, its gentrification. Often characterized by advocates as an urban panacea, gardening and farming seem to promise solutions to many different urban problems, such as blighted vacant lots, food insecurity, stormwater runoff, and neighborhood decline. However, questions of land tenure, the use of economic resources, and the long-term viability of urban agriculture shape the political discourse about the future of growing …

How Good Is Bicycling For The Environment?, Mark Chopping

Sustainability Seminar Series

Bicycling has been promoted as a means to reduce our dependence on climate-warming fossil fuel burning, clean the air in our streets, promote personal health, and fight widespread obesity. It is often postulated that there are obvious environmental benefits associated with increasing participation in cycling as a transportation alternative, since the bicycles’ fuel is the banana and/or the muffin. This presentation will discuss why mass bicycling might not be quite as good for the environment as you may imagine – though it is still very, very good indeed.

Quantifying Transport Of Passive Tracers And Inertial Particles In Geophysical Flows, Eric Forgoston

Sustainability Seminar Series

There has been a steady increase in the deployment of autonomous underwater and surface vehicles for applications such as ocean monitoring, tracking of marine processes, and forecasting contaminant transport. The underwater environment poses unique challenges since robots must operate in a communication and localization-limited environment where their dynamics are tightly coupled with the environmental dynamics. This work presents current efforts in understanding the impact of geophysical fluid dynamics on underwater vehicle control and autonomy. The focus of the first part of the talk is on the control of collaborative vehicles to track Lagrangian coherent structures and to localize contaminant spills. …

Magmatism And Mass Extinction: Resolving The Flood Basalt Carbon Quandary, Benjamin Black

Sustainability Seminar Series

Voluminous flood basalt magmatism has coincided with multiple biotic crises, including the end-Permian, end-Triassic, and end-Cretaceous mass extinctions and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Geochemical evidence shows that warming and carbon cycle perturbation were features of each of these events. This proxy evidence is at odds with current estimates of the budget and isotopic composition of carbon in flood basalt magmas, which suggest that flood basalt magmatic carbon is inadequate and too isotopically heavy to explain the observations. To address the apparent conflict between paleoclimate and petrology, I present results from melt inclusions, carbonatites, geophysical modeling, and climate modeling to address …

Hyporheic Exchange With And Without Traveling Surface Waves, Vaughan R. Voller

Sustainability Seminar Series

Hyporheic exchange, the flow of surface water into and out of sediment substrates, play an important role in controlling temperature, pollutant, and dissolved oxygen levels in aquatic. A key driver for hyporheic flow is pressure variations over the water/sediment interface. Here, we compare and contrast, for a range flume conditions, hyporheic exchange in a flowing current with and without travelling surface waves. This is achieved experimentally by using a vertical array of electrical conductivity probes to track the movement of a conservative solute tracer in a gravel bed of a recirculating flume . In analyzing the experiment we fit a …

Exploiting Synchrotron “Light” To Study Chemistry Of Trace Elements In Soils And Plants, Ryan Tappero

Sustainability Seminar Series

Biogeochemical studies often require characterization of elemental abundances and speciation in samples that are chemically and physically heterogeneous at the micrometer scale. Synchrotron radiation sources are ideal for developing high intensity, highly-focused X-ray probes for interrogating the speciation, transport, and reactions of trace elements in heterogeneous earth and biological materials with detection sensitivities in the attogram range and spatial resolutions less than 1 micrometer.

X-ray Fluorescence Microprobe (XFM) is a new, multi-modal X-ray fluorescence microscope recently installed at the National Synchrotron Light Source-II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. XFM has capabilities for X- ray micro-fluorescence (μ-XRF) imaging and tomography, X-ray …

Heterogeneous Photo-Fenton Reactions And Hybridization With Ceramic Membrane Filtration, Wen Zhang

Sustainability Seminar Series

No abstract provided.

A Substance Flow Model For Global Phosphorus, David A. Vaccari

Sustainability Seminar Series

A mechanistic model of phosphorus flows through the global food system was developed to address questions about the relative effectiveness of and interactions among potential conservation interventions. Phosphorus is required as a fertilizer for producing food, and there is no substitute. Most phosphorus used in agriculture is mined, and 75% of the world’s reserves are controlled by a single country: Morocco. Thus the world’s food supply is potentially vulnerable to geopolitical conditions. Although known reserves can satisfy current demand for several centuries, it is nevertheless the case that an essential resource is being used unsustainably. Only about 10% of the …

Planning For Healthy Ecosystems And Sustainable Human Use In The Mid-Atlantic Ocean, Tony Macdonald

Sustainability Seminar Series

The seminar will focus on how coastal and marine sustainability issues in the Mid-Atlantic have been addressed through regional ocean planning and marine spatial planning. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean (MARCO) was established in 2009 to enhance the vitality of the region's ocean ecosystem and economy. Obama Administration established an Ocean Policy Task Force and signed an Executive Order on July 19, 2010 adopting the Final Recommendations of the Task Force, establishing a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts, and Great Lakes, and calling for the development of regional coastal and marine spatial plans.

MARCO’s …

Is There A Home For Agroforestry In Nutrient Credit Trading?, John Munsell

Sustainability Seminar Series

Agroforestry riparian buffers and upslope contour plantings provide environmental and economic benefits without eliminating annual farming opportunities. A public/private partnership in Virginia is leading a project titled Conservation Credit for Agroforestry Production (C-CAP) to study the potential for agroforestry to generate profitable credits in private nutrient trading markets. Phosphorus and nitrogen delivered to stream edges are modeled across a sample of agroforestry project sites. Results are being studied to determine financial profitability and relationships to Total Maximum Daily Loads. Research is also being conducted on tree-tube effectiveness, site preparation strategies, plant-water relations on contour, nitrogen fixer intercropping, and financial risk. …

Emergency Water Supply In Response To Natural Disasters, Yang Deng

Sustainability Seminar Series

Frequency and magnitude of natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes) increased globally over the past century. Clean water is a top priority for disaster-affected populations. However, existing emergency water treatment (EWT) methods are not all feasible or technically effective at many emergency situations. The recent Puerto Rican water crisis after Hurricane Maria highlights research needs and new challenges for new EWT technologies. This presentation will provide an overview of currently available EWT methods and then introduce the state of EWT research at MSU. Ferrate(VI) as an emerging treatment agent was recently investigated for the treatment of simulated disaster- polluted water. Results show …

Using Natural Resources To Control The Fate Of Contaminants In The Environment, Lucia Rodriguez Freire

Sustainability Seminar Series

Environmental contamination poses an increased health risk to those communities living nearby impacted sites, and it is imperative to find sustainable remediation strategies to restore the natural systems. My research investigates natural biogeochemical processes and the use of ubiquitous materials to the design remediation solutions that are site-specific and take into consideration the needs of the affected communities. The first example is the investigation of uranium (U) accumulation in plants growing along the Rio Paguate, which flows through the Jackpile Mine, and open-pit U mine listed on the National Priority List as a Superfund site. Two villages of the Laguna …

Ecosystem Engineering, Anthropogenic Landscapes, And Sea Level Changes Over 8000 Years Of Human History In The Eastern Caribbean, Peter E. Siegel

Sustainability Seminar Series

Upon first arrival of humans to new places anthropogenic disturbances to landscapes commence. Later groups of different people or descendants of the original colonists will make yet additional modifications and so on through time, so that by today the landscape contains a cumulative record of anthropogenic history. We combined the interpretive frameworks of landscape and historical ecology to investigate the anthropogenic trajectories across nine islands of the southern and eastern Caribbean. Microfossils from a series of environmental cores reveal the shifting and cumulative humanization of landscapes from c. 8000 cal yr BP through early European colonial occupations in this region.

10,000 Years Of Ice Sheet Change In Baffin Bay, Nicolas Young

Sustainability Seminar Series

The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere with a sea-level equivalent of 7.3 m and is expected to be a key contributor to 21st century (and beyond) sea-level rise. Estimates of GrIS-induced sea-level rise are dependent upon numerical ice-sheet models, but these models require some degree of “spin-up” or tuning to test model validity before forward modeling can commence. Within this framework, well-constrained geological records of GrIS change provide important spatial and temporal benchmarks for which to test numerical ice-sheet models. Of particular interest is reconstructing and modeling the behavior of the GrIS …

Understanding Abrupt Climate Change Over The Last 100,000 Years, Jennifer Hertzberg

Sustainability Seminar Series

Unlike the relatively stable climate Earth has experienced throughout the Holocene, Earth's climate system underwent a series of abrupt oscillations and reorganizations during the last glacial period and termination.

The first part of this seminar will investigate the trigger for the atmospheric CO2 rise that occurred during the last deglaciation, beginning 17,500 years ago. I will show that abrupt changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation occurring synchronously with the initial CO2 rise may have altered the oceanic biological pump, allowing CO2 to accumulate in the surface ocean and atmosphere. Records of surface and intermediate water foraminiferal δ13C suggest that …

Co2 Levels And Climate Change During Early Eocene Hyperthermals, Ying Cui

Sustainability Seminar Series

Early Eocene (56 to 33.9 million years ago) is punctuated by a series of rapid and extreme global warming events, known as the ‘hyperthermals’, triggered by massive release of carbon dioxide. Despite the carbon emission rate might have been ten times smaller than the current emission from burning fossil fuels and cement production, the early Eocene hyperthermals are considered one of the best analogues for CO2 concentration projected into the future. The temperature records are well established from deep sea sediments during these hyperthermals, but the CO2 levels in the atmosphere remain poorly known, partly due to the lack of …

Unlocking Past Ocean Circulation And Climate Changes Using Benthic Foraminifera, Chiara Borrelli

Sustainability Seminar Series

The analysis of the chemical and isotopic composition of calcareous benthic foraminifera is a widely used approach to reconstruct changes in ocean circulation and climate through time. In the first part of the seminar, I will present the application of the “traditional” benthic foraminiferal oxygen and carbon isotope ratios to reconstruct ocean circulation changes in the North Atlantic during the greenhouse-icehouse transition, one of the most important climatic and oceanographic transitions of the last 50 million years. In addition, I will present microscopy and spectroscopy data revealing a novel biomineralization strategy in a particular foraminiferal species called Melonis barleeanus. In …