Eric Saltzman
University of California-Irvine, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Hydrogen gas (H2) is a small but active part of the atmosphere, and interest in a future "hydrogen economy" makes it important to know how much H2 the air naturally held before humans began changing it. No record of atmospheric H2 from before the industrial era has existed.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
- Topics
atmospheric hydrogen
ice core
Greenland
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Reconstruct atmospheric molecular hydrogen (H2) over the past millennium by drilling a new ice core at Summit, Greenland and extracting trapped air from the samples in the field.
- Infer past H2 levels from measured H2/neon ratios, correcting for gas sorting as snow seals into ice (pore close-off fractionation) and for gas loss during drilling and sampling.
- Test whether H2 varied over centuries during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age, which is expected because soil microbes, which remove most H2, respond to soil moisture.
- Use the new H2 record, alongside neon and methane measurements, to constrain the global hydrogen cycle and test the climate models used to assess future H2 emissions.
More about the research
This project aims to build the first one, using air bubbles trapped in Greenland ice over the past thousand years.
Why it matters
A preindustrial baseline for atmospheric hydrogen would show how much human activity has already changed H2 levels. It would also test the global models used to predict the climate effects of a future hydrogen economy. This could inform assessments of how widespread hydrogen fuel use may alter atmospheric composition and climate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shawn Fraver
University of Maine, ME·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify how methanogens (methane-producing microbes) and methanotrophs (methane-consuming microbes) in Howland Forest soils drive methane flux across moisture and other environmental gradients, using microbial community profiling.
Robert DeConto
University of Massachusetts, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the northern Greenland Ice Sheet is more sensitive to Arctic warming than the southern ice sheet, by drilling through the ice and measuring cosmogenic nuclides such as beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 in the bedrock below to find past ice-free periods.
Christopher Butenhoff
Portland State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Intercalibrate early-1980s ethane measurements from the Oregon Graduate Institute global network with recent NOAA surface flask data so that historic and modern records can be compared.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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