News Release

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July 1, 2005

National Science Foundation Awards $620,000 To Boise State For Equipment For New Isotope Geology Laboratory 

The National Science Foundation has awarded Boise State University a $620,000 grant to purchase state-of-the-art equipment for a new Isotope Geology Laboratory that will be the first of its kind in the Interior Northwest.

The NSF grant will fund a thermal ionization mass spectrometer, or TIMS. The instrument measures the products of radioactive decay in microscopic minerals and can be used to determine the age of geologic materials such as rocks or fossils, and the composition of environmental samples such as dissolved minerals in water or lead contaminants in soil.

The TIMS equipment will be the centerpiece of a new ultra-clean laboratory now under construction at Boise State, according to Mark Schmitz, a Boise State geosciences professor who procured the grant. The new facility will enable Boise State faculty and students to collaborate with scientists at similar labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California-Berkeley and other research universities as part of a National Science Foundation program.

Among the national-scope projects Boise State will join is an NSF-funded initiative to precisely date the Earth�s geologic history.  Another project focuses on understanding future climate change by documenting how the Earth�s climate has changed over the past 500 million years.

In addition, the new TIMS equipment will support a number of local and regional research projects, such as determining when volcanic eruptions occurred on the Snake River Plain, or tracing how quickly water flows underground through the Boise Foothills and what dissolved minerals it picks up along the way.

When the new lab is operational early next year, Boise State will have the only TIMS capabilities in a geographic area stretching from the University of Washington in Seattle, Wash., to the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. As such, the facility will be an important regional center of training for the next generation of geoscientists, and may also support research at the Idaho National Laboratory, Schmitz said.

 �Geoscience is a global science, and we anticipate that current and future partnerships with scientists in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Australia and South America will flourish with the resources made available through this new facility,� Schmitz added.

Contact: Mark Schmitz, Department of Geosciences, (208) 426-5907, markschmitz@boisestate.edu                                                             

Media Contact: Janelle Brown, Communications and Marketing, (208) 426-1790, jbrown2@boisestate.edu

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Last reviewed on Thursday, December 22, 2005