This award will provide one-half the funding for acquiring a rare gas mass spectrometer system to be housed and operated in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT and Harvard faculty will utilize this equipment ,and MIT and Harvard are both institutionally committed to providing the remaining half of the funding required. The instrument will be used for argon 40/39 isotopic analysis leading to geochronological applications. The interested faculty at MIT and Harvard are actively involved in research to understand the pressure-temperature-time history of large rock masses as they become involved in large-scale tectonic movements (subduction, uplift, etc.). The age-dating capabilities of the argon 40/39 method is a vital input for such studies.
