News

Washington, DC— Pressure improves the ability of materials to turn heat into electricity and could potentially be used to create clean generators, according to new work from a team that includes Carnegie’s Alexander Goncharov and Viktor Struzhkin published in 

Former-GL postdoc Sergey Lobanov received the Mineral and Rock Early Career Award from AGU.

GL welcomed six wonderful interns this summer and DTM welcomed five. Their diligence and determination impressed us all summer. We know that they will do incredible things in the future.

Active materials can interchange types of energy. In a new cover article in the journal molecules, Geophysical Lab Staff Scientist Ronald Cohen and his colleague Haiwu Zhang report on predictions of a new class of polar metallocene crystals, which may be useful as active materials.

Congratulations to Ms. Carolyn Beaumont, a senior at the Potomac School, who won 5th place in the prestigious 78th Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Washington, DC—Carnegie’s Andrew Steele is a member of the Earth First Origins project, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Karyn Rogers, which has been awarded a $9 million grant by NASA’s Astrobiology Program.

Congratulations to Carolyn Beaumont and Peiqi Chen for being selected as top 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

The Geophysical Laboratory is pleased to announce the arrival of new Staff Scientist, Dr. Sally Tracy. Sally applies cutting edge experimental and analytical techniques to interrogate the fundamental physical behavior of materials at extreme conditions.

Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by the Geophysical Laboratory’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

Lab-based mimicry allowed an international team of physicists including the Geophysical Laboratory’s Alexander Goncharov to probe hydrogen under the conditions found in the interiors of giant planets—where experts believe it gets squeezed until it becomes a liquid metal, capable of conducting electricity. Their work is published in Science.

New work from a team led by the Geophysical Laboratory’s Alexander Goncharov confirms that nitrogen, the dominant gas in Earth’s atmosphere, becomes a metallic fluid when subjected to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. Their findings are published by Nature Communications.

A team of scientists led by the Geophysical Laboratory’s Shaunna Morrison and including Bob Hazen have revealed the mineralogy of Mars at an unprecedented scale, which will help them understand the planet’s geologic history and habitability.

By unanimous vote of the Carnegie Board of Trustees, Dr. Eric D. Isaacs has been appointed the 11th president of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Dr. Isaacs joins Carnegie from the University of Chicago and will succeed Interim Co-Presidents John Mulchaey and Yixian Zheng on July 2, 2018.

A team of researchers including the Geophysical Laboratory’s Bob Hazen is using network analysis techniques—made popular through social media applications—to find patterns in Earth’s natural history, as detailed in a paper published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 

The Geophysical Laboratory’s Tim Strobel and Venkata Bhadram now report unexpected quantum behavior of hydrogen molecules, H2, trapped within tiny cages made of organic molecules, demonstrating that the structure of the cage influences the behavior of the molecule imprisoned inside it.

New work from the Geophysical Laboratory's high-pressure geophysicists Chuanlong Lin, Jesse Smith, Stanislav Sinogeikin, and Guoyin Shen found evidence of the long-theorized, difficult-to-see low-density liquid phase of water.

Washington, DC — Plumes of hot rock surging upward from the Earth’s mantle at volcanic hotspots contain evidence that the Earth’s formative years may have been even more chaotic than previously thought, according to new work from the Geophysical Laboratory's Yingwei Fei and Colin Jackson published in Nature.

Piezoelectric materials are a class of smart materials that can convert electrical energy to mechanical energy and vice versa. Developing new piezoelectrics for novel electromechanical device applications has been a long-lasting interest, both scientifically and technologically. The negative response has been considered a rare and counterintuitive anomaly. The Geophysical Laboratory's Shi Liu and Ron Cohen showed that the negative response is not so rare after all.

Washington, DC— Reservoirs of oxygen-rich iron between the Earth’s core and mantle could have played a major role in Earth’s history, including the breakup of supercontinents, drastic changes in Earth’s atmospheric makeup, and the creation of life, according to recent work from an international research team published in National Science Review.

On October 13, 2017, Geophysical Laboratory Staff Scientist and Deep Carbon Observatory Executive Director Robert Hazen was awarded Honorary Membership in the Russian Mineralogical Society (RMS) for his “outstanding contributions to crystal chemistry of minerals under extreme conditions and theor

The Geophysical Laboratory’s Alex Goncharov and Terrestrial Magnetism’s Peter van Keken were awarded a Venture Grant to apply a novel flash-heating method for high- pressure/high-temperature experiments to measure the thermal conductivity of Mars. They will then develop new models to understand why that planet cooled so fast and early.

Washington, DC— A team of Geophysical Laboratory high-pressure physicists have created a form of carbon that’s hard as diamond, but amorphous, meaning it lacks the large-scale structural repetition of a diamond’s crystalline structure. Their findings are reported in Nature Communications.

August 18, 2017 -- Geophysical Laboratory scientists Guoyin Shen, Yingwei Fei, Shaunna Morrison, Bob Hazen, Dan Hummer, Asmaa Boujibar, Renbiao Tao and Haijun Huang presented their research at the annual Goldschmidt conference on August 13-18, 2017 in Paris. Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society.

The properties of hydrogen at extreme pressures and temperatures are of great interest to condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and planetary science due to the element’s putative