Two new mass spectrometers will be purchased and in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of California- Berkeley. They will be the primary analytical tools of a new Center for Isotope Geochemistry that is being jointly supported by the Berkeley campus and the adjacent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. One of the machines is a single-collector model configured to maximize the possibility of obtaining isotope ratio precision at the ppm level and will be used initially to measure strontium 87/86 isotope ratios in marine precipitates. The other instrument will be configured as a multi-collector instrument to increase sample throughput so that certain types of data-intensive research problems can be undertaken. The Berkeley Center for Isotope Geochemistry is intended to be a science center which will have as its goals the improvement of isotopic geochemical tools and the broadening of their application to earth sciences. The Principal Investigator of this project has been appointed as the first director of the center.
