Welcome! We are Team 0, 39 Alpha’s inaugural research team. Born in the scorching heat of the Sonoran desert in 2020, we met while working between Everett Shock’s GEOPIG lab (a group that explores organic processes in geochemistry) and Sara Walker’s ELife lab (where they study astrobiology and related physics problems).

We share a passion for pure science, developing novel research ideas, and building scientific software. We also crave the pursuit of challenging environmental projects that lie outside traditional disciplinary silos. We believe humanity is at a unique point in our collective history. We have the power to destroy the environment that sustains us while similtaneously harboring the intellect and compassion to investigate (and possibly mitigate) our impact on the Earth and its biosphere.

The diversity of our collective skill set and our interest in exceptionally interdisciplinary research made it unlikely that we would get hired somewhere together to do environmental research, so we decided to strike out on our own under guiding principles that we believe should be common in science (but are not – yet). We research as a team, publish as a team, and make our software and research public as a team. While the scientific community does not traditionally conduct research in this way, we believe they should. We are living the change we want to see in science.

Each of us at Team 0 maintains our public science careers in geochemistry, physics, and astrobiology. However, as Team 0, we conduct research on original projects vital to the environment.

We are actively working on our Carbonate State-Space project to quantify the effect of $\ce{CO2}$-induced acidification on calcifying organisms in the Northern Pacific Ocean. This project employs Eleanor, a unique Python package developed by Team 0 in collaboration with Brandy Toner and NASA’s Exploring Ocean Worlds initiative. (Once we complete beta testing, Eleanor will be released publically on our Github profile.)

We are also exploring new project ideas related to clean hydrogen generation from geologic sources, which is motivated by Tucker Ely’s recent paper on $\ce{H2}$-generation in ultramafic-hosted hydrothermal. Hydrogen has the potential to replace hydrocarbons as society’s dominant energy source. We are interested in discovering new geologic settings and conditions that might yield large quantities of hydrogen naturally, and also exploring which of these settings might be easily harnessed by engineered solutions.

If you want to support our environmental research efforts, please consider donating. All donations to 39 Alpha support Team 0’s active research projects.