Laboratory
The laboratory is situated in McCone Hall on UC Berkeley's camps in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and consists of a room for mass spectrometry and spectroscopy and a room for general laboratory preparation. I additionally have laboratory space at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (~10 minutes away) that is centered around hydrothermal experimental systems.
Carbonate clumped-isotope measurements
One mass spectrometer is a Thermo 253 Plus isotope-ratio mass spectrometer. This instrument is coupled to a custom made carbonate digestion and purification line and runs 24/7 to measure carbonate clumped isotope compositions (both mass 47 and 48 species) on a variety of experimentally generated and environmental samples.
High-resolution mass spectrometry
Our laboratory also contains a Thermo Ultra high-resolution isotope-ratio mass spectrometer. This is one of only a few in the world that can measure ions that differ by <0.001 Da. We use this instrument to measure the clumped isotopic composition of methane, methoxyl groups from lignin, and molecular hydrogen.
Scan of mass 18 methane on the Ultra showing separation of 13CH3D and 12CH2D2 from each other and other adducts. From Eldridge et al. (2019, ACS E&SC).
Additional Equipment
The lab has a variety of accessory instruments for the preparation of samples and experiments including multiple furnaces, ovens, heating systems, gold-bag hydrothermal cells (at LBNL), gas chromatographs, and a custom glass vacuum line with a cryostat for taking samples down to 4K.
IMG_5525.m4vTime-lapse video of Dan Ibarra (former Miller postdoc, now professor at Brown) working with the vacuum line.
Coming Soon
Summer 2023 we will be installing an Aerodyne TILDAS spectroscopic system for measured 17O in CO2