Facilities and Equipment

The department maintains state-of-the-art equipment for conducting high quality field and laboratory research.  Major field equipment includes:

• Laser In-Situ Scattering and Transmissionmetry (LISST);
• sea-bed hydraulic flume;
• a meteorological station with a precipitation collector for low-level organic contaminants;
• high-volume air samplers;
• a rotating drum surface microlayer sampler;
• and bottom boundary layer instrumental tetrapod systems for measuring bed stress, wave and currents, sediment resuspension, and bed level changes.

A variety of instrumentation including:

• tide gauges,
• current meters,
• conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) profilers,
• fluorometers,
• dissolved oxygen (DO) meters,
• fathometers,
• dual-frequency side-scan sonars,
• variable frequency sub-bottom profiling systems,
• directional wave gauges,
• turbidity sensors,
• acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCP),
• Kasten and box corers,
• Microwave and GPS navigation systems are maintained by the department for accurate positioning of research vessels.

The department houses extensive laboratory instrumentation, including:

• Europa isotope ratio mass spectrometer with ANCA prep unit and dual inlet
• Alpkem flow Solution 4 Autoanalyzer
• Shimadzu TOC-5000 Carbon analyzer
• Antek NOx analyzer
• microwave-assisted solvent extraction system;
• large-capacity, refrigerated, programmable centrifuge;
• ultra-cold (-80 deg C) freezers;
• Fisons EA1108 CHNS-O analyzer;
• UV/Vis spectrophotometer;
• gas chromatographs with flame ionization and electron capture detectors;
• two quadrupole mass spectrometers;
• Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrophotometer (ICP/AES);
• EDS system with full SEM imaging capabilities;
• Powder X-ray Diffractometer;
• Nitrogen Adsorption Surface Area and Porosity Analyzer;
• CHNSO elemental analyzer;
• high performance liquid chromatograph with UV absorbance and liquid
• scintillation detectors;
• two laboratory flumes (recirculating and annular);
• five intrinsic germanium gamma spectrometers;
• eight channel alpha spectroscopy system;
• X-ray radiography unit;
• sedigraph automatic particle analyzer;
• rapid sediment analyzer.

Computer facilities range from laptop units for field use to work stations supporting LANs (local area networks) to the institute-wide network.  Computer users have ready access to external networks. Pentium-PC, UNIX and MacIntosh systems are supported by the Institute's computer center. Also, the numerical modeling group is supported by a multi-processor Dec/Compaq/HP ES40.