19 of the 69 Earth and Environmental Sciences projects at ISEF 2026 won a Grand Award. Here's every one, with its abstract.
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences First Award
It's been hypothesized that carbonaceous chondrite meteorites can transport compounds crucial to planetary habitability. Meteorites generate hydrothermal systems through impact energy dissip…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences First Award
There remains to be a purely natural, comprehensive water purification method that can remove both pathogens and heavy metals and is capable of implementation in resource-limited settings. T…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Second Award
Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (HABs) pose threats to aquatic ecosystems and public health, yet existing prediction models rely on single-variable correlative thresholds that fail to ca…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Second Award
Oil spills are among the most serious environmental threats. They remain difficult to control, and current remediation methods either disperse oil into water or use chemically aggressive tre…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Second Award
Because exact earthquake prediction remains unavailable and retrofit budgets are limited, I developed a physics-anchored continuous space-time model to rank where short-term regional seismic…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Second Award
Wildfire smoke increasingly impacts agricultural land, specifically in the PNW, yet the effects of seed exposure to smoke remain poorly understood. This study investigated the effects on pla…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
Climate change continues to disrupt agricultural systems, making crop yield forecasting a critical component towards enabling climate resilience in agriculture. This project aimed to deciphe…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
Coral reefs are the world’s most vital marine ecosystems, producing 50% of the world’s oxygen and sustaining the livelihoods of 1 billion people globally. However, coral bleaching, a phenome…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
The eastern oyster is critical for coastal habitats and provides biological benefits such as improved water quality, stabilization of shorelines, and increased estuarine biodiversity, yet oy…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
Pollution is a concern throughout the world, particularly in oceans. Recent concerns have arisen about the impacts of microplastics. Sea urchins are commonly used for developmental studies,…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
Tornadoes are among the deadliest and costliest weather phenomena in our world and remain challenging to predict despite significant advancements in weather forecasting. Current tornado fore…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Third Award
Sensing of the Tropopause and Marine Boundary Layer (MBL) is limited by cost and operational constraints of conventional fixed monitoring systems. WindDrift is a dual-modality Lagrangian sen…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Sub-Saharan Africa is vulnerable to variations in precipitation levels, as a large percentage of the population practices subsistence farming and most of their electricity is from hydropower…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Individuals spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, so maintaining a good Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is important. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is an essential component of IAQ, as t…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Access to safe drinking water remains a pressing global challenge, with millions exposed to heavy-metal contamination each year. At the same time, fertilizer runoff degrades water quality th…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Nine of NOAA’s top 10 costliest natural disasters were major hurricanes, highlighting the logically clear need to protect the 40% of the global population living near coastal areas. Despite…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Known as the “rainforests of the sea” coral reefs support over 1 billion people. Yet the rising ocean temperatures have driven increasingly frequent coral bleaching events, threatening reefs…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Rainfall-generated soil erosion at highway construction sites is a significant source of contaminants in stormwater discharges, which has serious implications for water quality and regulator…
ISEF · 2026
Earth and Environmental Sciences Fourth Award
Currently, plastic pollution is one of the major environmental challenges faced due to the mass presence of synthetic polymers and their degradation into microplastics and nanoplastics, whic…