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Environmental Sedimentology Facility

• Location: Core Scanning - Room O1.20, 1st Floor, Kathleen Lonsdale Building
• Location: Biogeochemistry - Room OG5C, Ground Floor, Kathleen Lonsdale Building
• Telephone Extension: 3
• Laboratory Manager: Prof Juergen Thurow
  

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The facility offers a range of equipment housed in two separate rooms. The core scanning lab houses a XRF scanner and multi-sensor core logger. There are two chest-fridges for temporary storage of cores up to a length of 1.6 m. and bench space for sample preparation and core photography.

The biogeochemistry lab houses a LC/MS and elemental analyser.  The lab also offers a dedicated work area for solvent extraction of biomarkers.

Avaatech XRF-scanner

The scanner uses standard XRF-technology to measure elemental abundances on split sediment cores without the need for sample preparation. It is designed to allow fast analysis of long and continuous records: it typically takes ~2 hours to scan 1 m of core at 1 cm resolution for a standard suite of elements. The trade-off is that results are semi-quantitative, because variation in water content and/or porosity is not accounted for. However, results can be calibrated through analysis of a limited set of discrete samples using standard XRF or ICP-MS. The XRF-scanner can detect elements ranging from Al through to U, the stratigraphic resolution can be adjusted from 1 mm to 1 cm. The detection limit varies between elements, ranging from 1% for Al to ppm-levels for elements higher in the periodic table.

Geotek Multi-Sensor Core logger

The core-logger is used to collect a suite of geophysical measurements on both whole-round and split cores. Our MSCL is equipped to measure gamma ray attenuation (GRAPE), which provides an estimate for density/porosity of the sediment, P-wave velocities, electrical resistivity, and magnetic susceptibility.

Agilent 1200/6130 LC/MS

The LC/MS is dedicated to the measurement of TEX86 and related indices as palaeotemperature proxies. The general group of GDGTs (glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers) is derived from the cell membrane of archaea and bacteria, the remains of which are ubiquitous in marine and terrestrial sedimentary organic matter. Bacteria modify the composition of their cell membrane when ambient conditions, like temperature, change to regulate osmotic exchange with the environment. The ratio of different GDGT molecules relative to each other in marine organic matter correlates with ambient temperature. This ratio, TEX86, yields accurate sea surface temperature estimates from sediments dating as far back as the Eocene and the Cretaceous. We found that sediments with as little as 0.3% organic carbon yield well preserved GDGTs.

FlashEA Elemental Analyser

The FlashEA can measure the abundance of organic elements in samples as small as 0.01 mg depending on the type of material. It is routinely set up for analysis of C and N in sediment samples, but can be reconfigured for CHNS-O or any combination of those elements.

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