Transcript – A Triad of Geological and Environmental ICPMS Applications

The T3 project, titled to Triad of Geological and Environmental ICBM’s Applications, is a collaboration between Brent Miller and Nick Perez, both of the Department of Geology and Geophysics and Shankar Chellam in the Department of Environmental Engineering. Along with Nick and Shankar’s graduate students, Emily White and Sarraf. Does this T-3 project centers on sharing expertise in applications of inductively of plasma mass spectrometry to analyze very small mineral and aerosol samples for their elemental and isotopic compositions. Our geological applications use the mineral zircon to track the ages and origins of rocks in Atlantic Canada and in South America. These projects use a finely focused laser to vaporize very small portions of the mineral in order to determine both their geological ages and the character of the geological environment under which they formed. And all of this information comes from about one billionth of a gram of material. Atmospheric aerosols are also very small samples, and because these are typically dissolved and analyzed in solution, the preparation of these materials must be very meticulously calibrated through the collaboration we’ve been able to draw from the very best analytical approaches in both the geological and environmental fields in order to create a new, highly optimized method for analyzing these difficult samples. By combining these three applications under this one project, we have forged a strong working relationship across departments and across colleges, which going forward will allow us to work closely together in ways that would probably not have happened without the incentive provided by the T-3 program. So we would like to thank everyone involved in the president’s excellence fund for making this collaboration possible. Thank you.