Acquisition of a Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer for EARTHTIME

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award will provide the funding to acquire a Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer (TIMS) for the Isotope Laboratory in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. With the growing momentum behind the EARTHTIME initiative, we will purchase a new instrument that will be optimized for and dedicated to high-precision U-Pb geochronology of uranium-bearing accessory minerals and fulfilling the mission of EARTHTIME. The EARTHTIME project is a community-based organization dedicated to establishing a coordinated international infrastructure and the analytical facilities necessary to achieve high resolution calibration of the past 800 million years of Earth history. To achieve this goal, EARTHTIME seeks to reduce geochronologic uncertainties through a cooperative effort between laboratories and to promote communication between geochronologists and paleontologists/ stratigraphers. At present, much of the effort has been directed towards eliminating inter-laboratory and inter-technique biases for ID-TIMS U-Pb and 40Ar-39Ar geochronology. The next step for EARTHTIME is to expand the analytical capacity of NSF-funded labs. This award will permit the expansion of the MIT lab's capabilities to aid both the PIs own research and to create a dedicated EARTHTIME lab to serve the greater community. As a dedicated EARTHTIME node, the MIT facility would represent part of a planned network of laboratories that will accommodate scientists from other institutions, especially students, who wish to visit and learn the science of geochronology. The goal is to train a new generation of earth scientists for whom high-precision geochronology is part of their scientific tool kit, whether paleontologist, stratigrapher, or petrologist. Several former graduate students and post-doctoral scholars now play leadership roles in EARTHTIME-related geochronology in both the U.S. and Europe. As part of our effort as an EARTHTIME node, Bowring will continue an aggressive program of education and outreach to teach middle and high school students about the science of geochronology.