Through Stanford's Global Climate & Energy Project, a number of faculty work in the field of subsurface carbon dioxide storage. Petroleum engineering professor Franklin M. Orr Jr. and assistant professor Anthony R. Kovscek are developing ultra-fast computational methods to predict the behavior, under different conditions, of carbon dioxide injected into geological formations such as unexploitable coal beds, oil and gas reservoirs, and deep aquifers containing salt water.
Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics, is assessing the vulnerability of deep aquifers and oil and gas reservoirs to fracturing and leakage when used for carbon dioxide sequestration.
Geophysics professor Jerry M. Harris is developing strategies to monitor carbon dioxide injections, following where the gas is going while checking the reservoirs for leaks. His focus is on time-lapse imaging that can provide more continuous monitoring than conventional methods.
At the center for environmental sciences and policy, postdoctoral research fellow Dena MacMynowski studies how climate change affects North American songbirds, and how their ranges and timing of migration relate to environmental factors such as weather and temperature. Postdoctoral scholar Michael Mastrandrea, PhD '04, researches the global and regional impacts of climate change to assess potentially dangerous effects, and conducts risk analysis of policy choices with the aim of reducing the possibility of harmful climate change.
The research group of Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences and professor of environmental studies, has shown how changing tropical land use and agricultural activity increase atmospheric concentrations of trace gases. Working with interdisciplinary experts in land use issues in the Yaqui Basin of Sonora, Mexico, their aim is to devise ways to make sustainable choices in development and resource use that take into account all the components of the ecosystem.
