Jeremy Snyder

About Me

I’m a visual storyteller specializing in science communication. I’m interested sharing science in ways that are exciting, accessible, and allow people to see rich new details in the familiar.

For the last 5 years I've been working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) as a photographer and multimedia specialist. I work with scientists to communicate their research about climate and earth systems, accompanying them into the field from Malaysia to Osage Nation and producing StoryMaps, illustrations, and talks.
Before that I traveled the Amazon River from source to delta on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, using photography to tell the story of river science.

Right now, I'm taking a year to sail around the Pacific aboard my sailboat, Tardigrade. Check out my recent work on instagram or my blog, and sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date.

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My work has been featured by:

What I'm up to now:

Sailing Tardigrade

My wife and I are spending a year living on our sailboat Tardigrade (named for the indestructible microscopic critter). We started our sailing journey in 2022 by spending our honeymoon on a week-long sailing course, then spent the last three years saving up, learning everything we could about sailing and boat maintenance, and preparing ourselves and the boat to go offshore. We left in May 2025 to sail from the SF Bay up to Canada, and are now headed south to Mexico. You can follow our journey on our Substack, Tales from Tardigrade, or instagram @sailing.tardigrade

Latest Blog Post

An Epic Sail Home
Our journey sailing down the coast from British Columbia to the SF Bay was one of the coolest, most intense, most trying and rewarding experiences of my life, and we did a lot of journaling to try and capture the trip in real time. With this post we wanted to bring our readers along and experience some of the sights, sensations, and wildlife encounters that define these long offshore passages.

Recent Talks

How Water Shaped the West
My talk at AGU Ignite

This NASA-sponsored SciComm event at the American Geophysical Union conference is designed to keep scientists on their toes with slides that advance every 15 seconds. I presented on "seeing the West through watersheds" to a full house of several hundred people at the Great American Music Hall in SF.

Watch on Youtube

My Artist Talk with Peak Design
At the SF flagship store

I gave this talk to accompany a gallery show of my photos at the Peak Design flagship store in San Francisco. This recording captures the first half of the talk, about how rivers and watersheds shaped the natural landscapes of the American West and how human infrastructure has changed those systems.

Watch on Youtube

See the images featured in these shows:

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Recent Visual Storytelling

Publications

Photo Essay: Princess Loisa Inlet
This recent dispatch from our sailing newsletter combines my writing and photography from the culmination of our journey into British Columbia

Several people in a line skiing through snow-covered mountains, witht he blazing sun forming a starburst low on the horizon

Magazine Article: How You Know You're on a Boat
Our account of trials and successes on the famously difficult trek up the Pacific from SF to Canada was published in the August issue of Latitude 38 Magazine

Storymaps

Power and Promise Beneath the Salton Sea
A deep-dive into the promising possibility of sustainably harvesting lithium from the brine used to generate geothermal electricity.

Field Days: Tracking Weather and Water in the Rockies
A brief look at a day in the life of scientists studying the weather and snowpack that feeds the Colorado River.

see more Visual Storytelling

Recent Illustrations

SciComm Poster series for AGU

I created these posters to communicate Berkeley Lab's science at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference

I've long been inspired by NASA's Other Worlds Travel Posters, which drew on a retro-modern Works Progress Administration style to evoke a sense of hope and futurism while leaving room for some less-literal artistic interpretation. I found this to be a powerful approach to creating science communication that captures the attention and imagination, and I've channeled it into several of my past illustrations, including this cover of Nature Climate Change. I expanded that series to create a set of posters about Berkeley Lab's science that we gave out as prizes from our booth at AGU in December 2024. Click below to see the captions that accompany each.

What Happens When Rainforests Dry Out? Berkeley Lab scientists with the NGEE-Tropics project are investigating how rainforests, from the Amazon to Malaysia, respond to drought. Using buried soil moisture sensors, sap-flow sensors in trees, and atmospheric observation towers, they create a soil-to-sky picture of water movement in the ecosystem. These insights are crucial for predicting the future of tropical forests and guiding conservation strategies.

What Can We Learn When the Sun Disappears? In April 2024, a total solar eclipse swept across North America, and Berkeley Lab scientists turned this celestial event into a unique research opportunity. Leveraging the extensive Ameriflux network of eddy covariance flux towers, they explored how the sudden absence of solar radiation affects gas exchange in terrestrial ecosystems—a variable nearly impossible to alter artificially.

What Happens When the Arctic Warms? - Berkeley Lab scientists discovered how longer, hotter growing seasons are causing increased annual methane emissions from boreal Arctic wetlands. Research by the national lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area pulled together an unprecedented dataset to demonstrate this, using a network of portable gas exchange chambers and eddy covariance flux towers installed around the Arctic circle.

What's Beneath the Lunar Surface? In collaboration with NASA, Berkeley Lab scientists are developing innovative techniques to identify the qualities and quantities of ice beneath the surface of the moon. By analyzing seismic vibrations generated by a rover equipped with a rock drill, this innovative method aims to “see” the ice that is suspected to exist near the shadowed walls of lunar craters, which may someday be a source of water for a moon base.

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Recent Journal Covers

a graphic vector art illustration of a lush wetland with several scientific instruments nestled among the grass and a dramatic setting sun reflected in the water

The cover of the academic journal Nature Geoscience, bearing my aerial image of a meandering river in the Colorado Rockies

I developed this retro-modern illustration when no photos were available for my colleagues' paper in the March 2024 issue of Nature Climate Change. I aimed to capture a sense of languid late summer warmth and teeming growth around the gas flux chambers and eddy covariance towers used in the study

My first project with the Watershed Function Science Focus Area at Berkeley Lab told the stories of Natural, Impacted, and Managed water in the Rockies and the American West. My photography from this project was selected for the April 2021 cover of Nature Geoscience and March 2022 cover of Science Advances.

The Watson Fellowship

I spent much of 2019-2020 on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, traveling the length of the Amazon River and using photography to showcase the science of river systems.
This project was put on hold for the pandemic, with the exception of a foray along the Colorado River in October 2021.

Go to The Watson