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Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry

The Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry (LUC) focuses on fundamental research and education for assessing the impact of human activities and natural processes on human health, environment and climate.
The surface chemistry research group investigates multi-phase chemical processes relevant for atmospheric chemistry and the analytical chemistry research group reconstructs environmental and climatic conditions from high-altitude glaciers.

2 November 2020
Iezzi_Lucia

Welcome to Lucia Iezzi

We warmly welcome Lucia Iezzi as a PhD student in the Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry. She has joined the Surface Chemistry group on 1 November 2020.

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3 August 2020
Mahrt_Fabian

Welcome to Fabian Mahrt

We gladly announce that Fabian Mahrt has started to work as Postdoc in the Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry. He formally joined the Surface Chemistry group on 1 August 2020 but has started his work actually at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada.

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2 June 2020
Fang_Ling

Congratulations to Ling Fang

On 2 June 2020 Ling successfully defended her PhD entitled “Radiocarbon analysis of dissolved organic carbon from ice cores" at the University of Bern. This was the first time that a student from our lab defended online and Ling delivered a great performance. Congratulations! The project was conducted in collaboration with the Laboratory for the Analysis of Radiocarbon with AMS (LARA) of the University of Bern, Nanjing University, and the University of Maine, amongst others, and funded jointly by the University of Bern and the Paul Scherrer Institute.

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17 October 2018
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Why the Little Ice Age ended in the middle of the 19th century

Media Releases Energy and Environment Enviroment

In the first half of the 19th century, a series of large volcanic eruptions in the tropics led to a temporary global cooling of Earth's climate. That Alpine glaciers grew and subsequently receded again during the final phase of the so-called Little Ice Age was due to a natural process. This has now been proven by PSI researchers on the basis of ice cores.

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26 September 2017
In the experimental chamber, a very thin vertical jet of water can be seen, which flows downward in the middle of the picture from a small tube. During the experiment, the chamber contains a gas mixture including ozone, which reacts on the surface with bromide in the water and produces bromine. As an intermediate step in the process, a short-lived compound of bromide and ozone is made, which was detected for the first time ever with the help of X-ray light from SLS. For this proof, the X-ray light knocked …

Light from the particle accelerator helps to understand ozone decomposition

PSI researchers have developed an experimental chamber in which they can recreate atmospheric processes and probe them with unprecedented precision, using X-ray light from the Swiss Light Source SLS. In the initial experiments, they have studied the production of bromine, which plays an essential role in the decomposition of ozone in the lower layers of the atmosphere. In the future, the new experiment chamber will also be available for use by researchers from other scientific fields.

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  • A Holocene black carbon ice-core record of biomass burning in the Amazon Basin from Illimani, Bolivia D Osmont, M Sigl, A Eichler, TM Jenk and M Schwikowski
    Climate of the Past 15, 579-592 (2019).
    DOI: 10.5194/cp-15-579-2019
  • A new method for the determination of primary and secondary terrestrial and marine biomarkers in ice cores using liquid chromatography high-resolution mass spectrometry ACF King, C Giorio, E Wolff, E Thomas, O Karroca, M Roverso, M Schwikowski, A Tapparo, A Gambaro and M Kalberer
    Talanta 194, 233-242 (2019).
    DOI: 10.1016/j.talanta.2018.10.042