Other Equipment

The departments supporting the Special Program also have a wide range of additional equipment that is accessible to students for their research.
This includes:

• Excellent rock-crushing facilities, comprising a Rocklabs tungsten-carbide ring mill, two automatic agate pestle and mortar grinders, and two jaw crushers;
• A quenching furnace (Siliconit) and cold seal vessels (High Pressure Chemical Co.) for mineralogical experiments and mineral syntheses;
• Comprehensive equipment for grain-size analysis of sediments, including conventional sieving, a laser diffraction particle size analyzer (Shimazu SALD-3000; 0.08-3000 µm) and settling tube apparatus;
• A large centrifuge for geodynamic modeling;
• Several atomic absorption spectrometers (Hitachi 508A and Shimazu AA606), an isotope ratio mass spectrometer (Finigan Mat Delta-S), UV-visible recording spectrometers (Shimazu UV-160), an ion chromatograph (Shimazu HIC-6A), and a low background liquid scintillation counter system (Wallac Quantulus 1220) for the quantitative determination of ¹⁴C;
• Supersoft X-ray apparatus (Softex) for imaging sedimentary structures in soft sediments, such as in cores of lagoonal sediments;
• A satellite image data processing system, consisting of a data processing unit with VISTA software, communication unit, data output unit and a Sun 4 workstation;
• A spinner magnetometer (Natsuhara SMD-88) with equipment for thermal and alternating field demagnetization (TDS-1 and DEM-95).