This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award will fund acquisition and installation of a new inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS) instrument in the GeoAnalytical Lab at Washington State University (WSU). It will replace a 12 year old instrument that is now obsolete. The ICPMS facility at WSU is employed in a very broad range of Earth and enviromental science and chemistry research. In-house projects that use data from the instrument include studies of super-eruptions from volcanic calderas (Valles caldera, Jemez Mountains, NM) and large igneous provinces (Columbia River flood basalts and Snake River Plain rhyolites). In these cases, trace element data are essential to understanding the generation, storage, and transport of magmas that feed the largest basaltic and rhyolitic eruptions, which are known to have caused major environmental disruption in the past. A very different in-house application is investigation of the aqueous geochemistry, basic solution chemistry and separation science of lanthanides and actinides with applications to radioactive waste transport and storage and to the ultimate closing of the nuclear fuel cycle.
In the broader U.S. scientific community, the WSU analytical service supplies high-quality data at low cost to a wide range of university- and institution-based scientists in North America (and some overseas) who work with the trace element contents of rocks, sediments, soils and waters and have come to rely on the service provided by the WSU laboratory. The facility will also serve to train future analysts and geochemists who will enter the geoscience/enviromental science workforce. About 12 graduate students per year from WSU and elsewhere are trained in sample preparation, experiment design, and use of the ICPMS equipment.
