Hot Topics: Power, Pollution, & Permafrost

From powering your smartphone to driving electric vehicles, batteries are at the heart of modern life. This talk will unravel the science behind how batteries work, explore their key components, and dive into the processes used to manufacture them. Finally, the talk will cover more sustainable approaches in battery manufacturing which is the focus of the European project NoVOC.

Beneath the waters of the Baltic Sea lies a hidden contaminant vault in the seafloor, which can release toxic chemicals after storms or the passage of ships. Once these chemicals are released into the water, they can be harmful to aquatic organisms. Therefore, it is crucial to develop tools for monitoring this contamination and to provide policymakers with recommendations for prioritizing remediation efforts in the affected zones.

Methane is a strong greenhouse gas and has been observed to be released over substantial scales in the world's largest shallow shelf sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. This shelf sea began forming approximately 15,000 years ago, due to a rise in sea level of about 120 meters after the last glaciation. Therefore, this sea is underlain by frozen layers hundreds of meters thick. Human-induced climate change is warming the Arctic three times faster than the global average, posing a risk to the stability of methane and other carbon deposits in these frozen layers. Their gigantic size, significantly larger than the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere, underscores the risk of additional greenhouse gas emissions, which would further intensify global warming. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the observed methane emissions is crucial for predicting future methane emissions from this region.