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.

The Latest News

31 January 2019

Congratulations to Sven Avak

On 31 January 2019 Sven successfully defended his PhD entitled “Impact and Implications of Melting on the Preservation of Trace Elements in High-Alpine Snow and Glacier Ice" at the University of Bern. Congratulations! This thesis formed part of the collaborative project Microscale Distribution of Impurities in Snow and Glacier Ice (MiSo) in co-operation with LUC's Surface Chemistry research group and the WSL-SLF Davos. The project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

29 October 2018

Congratulations to Dimitri Osmont

Dimitri successfully defended his PhD at the University of Bern, entitled "Reconstruction of forest fires through chemical analysis of black carbon in ice cores from high- alpine glaciers". This thesis formed part the collaborative project paleo fires with ETH Zürich and University of Bern funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

20 October 2018

Tagesschau: Neue Beweise zu Gletscher-Schmelze

The evening news on Swiss national television, SRF Tagesschau on Saturday evening 19h30, featured LUC's research on regional climate change with a story on the cause of glacier melting at the end of the Little Ice Age in Switzerland.

Current Scientific Highlight

17 October 2018

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.

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.

21 September 2017

Coexistence of Physisorbed and Solvated HCl at Warm Ice Surfaces

The interfacial ionization of strong acids is an essential factor of multiphase and heterogeneous chemistry in environmental science, cryospheric science, catalysis research and material science. Using Near Ambient Pressure X-ray Photoelectron (NAPP) spectroscopy, we directly detected a low surface coverage of adsorbed HCl at 253 K in both molecular and dissociated states and interpret the results as physisorbed molecular HCl at the outermost ice surface and dissociation occurring upon solvation deeper in the interfacial region. This study gives clear evidence for nonuniformity across the air−ice interface and questions the use of acid−base concepts in interfacial processes.

The Latest Publications

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

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