Acquisition and Upgrade of Instrumentation for Noble Gas Geochronology and Thermochronology

This award will result in the installation and commissioning of new mass spectrometry instruments that will greatly enhance the analytical capabilities of the Group 18 Laboratories at Arizona State University (ASU). These capabilities will be used predominantly to develop an enhanced understanding of a variety of geoscience processes, especially the evolution of major fault zones, the topographic evolution of mountain ranges, and the depositional history of active and ancient sedimentary basins.

This instrumentation will enable state-of-the-art dating of geologic materials with extremely high spatial resolution and precision. In addition to supporting ASU geoscience research, the investigators are dedicated to making these instruments available for the support of research projects from external, federally funded research by scientists at other universities and research facilities.

All of the work supported by these instruments will promote the advancement of geoscience in the United States, in particularly through studies of topics related to energy and strategic mineral resource development and natural hazards. Through the associated development of freely available, web-based tutorials based on the design, building, and commissioning of these instruments for the purpose of training future laboratory technicians, we hope this project will have lasting impact on geoscience research.

This project involves the acquisition of a new, multicollector, noble gas mass spectrometer (Isotopx NGX-600) that will be incorporated into an ultraviolet laser ablation microprobe (UVLAMP) analytical system. This system will be unusually capable for UVLAMP work, which will permit us to develop improved mircoanalytical protocols for 40Ar/39Ar geochronologic studies of unusually young samples with very high spatial resolution.

The project also involves an electronics and software upgrade of an existing GV Instruments Helix SFT to enable rapid throughput laser ablation (U-Th)/He dating of detrital minerals. Together these instruments will accelerate and improve our geoscience research output, will allow us to serve a larger number of external users, and will expand the types of studies that we can accommodate.

We will take advantage of the acquisition part of this project to develop an educational program specifically aimed at graduate students nationwide, with the goal of providing them with a sense of the complexity of this endeavor and a better understanding of the instrumentation side of geochronology and thermochronology.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.