NSF Award
1726075
High quality geochemical analyses of waters, minerals, and rocks using state-of-the-art analytical equipment are important to advance our knowledge of important societally relevant environmental questions and to train the next-generation workforce of geochemists and analytical chemists. This award will purchase a plasma-source, triple, quadrupole mass spectrometer for a four-year college that has a outstanding reputation for graduating undergraduates who are able to transition directly into high profile graduate schools and technical jobs that require experience in using state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation. The instrument supports research, much of it societally relevant, and trains undergraduate students in the use of state-pf-the-art geochemical techniques. The instrument is the primary driver of a new institutional initiative to address water quality and contamination: The Union College Water Initiative. Its goals include examining drinking water contamination across the region, assessing potentially polluted areas (including fracking fluids and heavy metal contamination in lakes and radionuclides in shale- and granite- hosted groundwaters), and monitoring water chemistry in active volcanic regions in the Caribbean. In addition to this societal impact, the new institute will give Union College greater exposure to the community as a resource. The drinking water project will educate student participants about the potential sources of heavy metals in drinking water, providing them with the opportunity to create a public brochure and website explaining the sources of the metals and contaminants, EPA limits, and strategies for dealing with contaminated water. Within the community, students will act as liaisons and ambassadors, collecting the water samples or instructing others in collection methods, and then explaining results. Other water projects will target specific locations and sources of pollutants and provide critical information for communities that have suffered adverse environmental impacts. Union College has partnered with the University of West Indies to analyze water samples near volcanoes to establish a chemical baseline for use in future volcano monitoring efforts. It has also initiated outreach efforts to inform the public about potential hazards. All of the projects involve undergraduate students, providing important analytical training and research skills, which are critical in preparing the science and engineering workforce. The mass spectrometer will also be used in class projects and in course exercises, exposing more students to state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation. <br/><br/>Societally relevant environmental and pollution-related water quality studies will be carried out with the new Union College inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. The new instrument has higher detection limits than Union College's present aging instrument that is near the end of its useful lifetime. In addition the new instrument has increased analytical speed and dynamic mass range. This allows for greatly enhanced interference rejection enabled by the new mass filter configuration, which will enable the development of a new analytical repertoire of geochemical species of interest to the research specialties of faculty and students at Union College. Projects include: (1) the study of volatile concentrations in magmatic apatite to better understand the state of volatile saturation prior to eruptions and to correlate widely dispersed volcanic deposits; (2) advance studies of trace element zoning in speleothems, which may be useful in both paleoclimate reconstruction and to track modern and archeological pollution events; (3) U-Pb dating of zircons with a quadrupole ICP-MS; (4) measuring biogenic silica in terrestrial lake core samples with increased throughput and decreased amount of sample destroyed; and (5) measuring element diffusion profiles in experimental iron-nickel alloys and sulfides to constrain the formation of planetary cores. All of these projects, and more, will benefit from the instrument's high sensitivity, rapid sample throughput, and ability to resolve interferences. The resulting data will establish important datasets that will improve our scientific understanding of various hydrologic systems that impact our present society.
