Latest research

Faculty at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences recommend these 22 books for your summer reading.

Earth system science professor Kate Maher discusses how researchers use computer modeling to better understand the chemical reactions in Earth’s subsurface that impact water supplies, energy waste storage, climate change and more.

The new normal for Western wildfires is abnormal, with increasingly bigger and more destructive blazes. Understanding the risks can help communities avert disaster.

As global temperatures climb, the risk of armed conflict is expected to increase substantially, according to experts across several fields. Extreme weather and related disasters can damage economies, lower farming production and intensify inequality.

From production to consumption, natural gas leaks claim lives, damage the climate and waste money. Research teams at Stanford are working on better ways to find and fix gas leaks quickly and inexpensively from one end of the system to the other.

A new study suggests vents in the seafloor may affect life near the ocean’s surface and the global carbon cycle more than previously thought. It’s the first to show how iron rising from beneath Earth’s crust stimulates massive phytoplankton blooms.

With new rules coming into effect, farmers and municipalities using groundwater must either find more water to support the aquifers or take cropland out of use. To ease the pain, engineers are looking to harness an unconventional and unwieldy source of water: the torrential storms that sometimes blast across the Pacific Ocean and soak California.

Poisonous heavy metals contaminating thousands of sites nationwide threaten to enter the food chain, and there’s been no easy way to remove them. An experimental chemical bath and electrochemical filter could now extract heavy metals from the soil and leave fields safe.

Immune markers and pollutant levels in the blood indicate wildfire smoke may be more harmful to children’s health than smoke from a controlled burn, Stanford researchers found.

Forty percent of food produced for consumption never gets eaten, instead filling landfills and releasing greenhouse gases. With a recent law, California aims to drastically reduce the amount of food that ends up in the ground.

Despite the surging focus on environmental sustainability, a new study suggests investors still care about the old kind of green.

As power grids move away from fossil fuels, companies seeking to cut out carbon emissions will have to go beyond commitments to renewable energy. 

A geothermal energy project triggered a damaging earthquake in 2017 in South Korea. A new analysis suggests flaws in some of the most common ways of trying to minimize the risk of such quakes when harnessing the Earth’s heat for energy.

A new type of combustion chamber presents a potential win-win situation in the space of alternative fuel technologies.

New research finds one drought can amplify or cause another. Decreased moisture recycling and transport impacts how droughts form and move across continents.

X-rays reveal an extinct mouse was dressed in brown to reddish fur on its back and sides and had a tiny white tummy.

A seemingly counterintuitive approach – converting one greenhouse gas into another – holds promise for returning the atmosphere to pre-industrial concentrations of methane, a powerful driver of global warming.

Data collected from over 1 million forest plots reveals patterns of where plant roots form symbiotic relationships with fungi and bacteria.

New research harnesses machine learning to accurately predict wheat yields in Australia months before harvest. The method could be translated to other crops and nations.

Stanford scientists and water experts met in Sacramento to discuss California water quality issues.

Measurements of suspended sediment concentrations reveal a lot about the health of a waterway, but until now such data has been difficult to obtain.