MRI: Acquisition of a gamma-ray spectrometer for surface-process and ocean research

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Maintenance of soil is critically important for sustaining the world's growing population. Eroded surface sediment can also be a major pollutant degrading aquatic ecosystems worldwide through light attenuation and heavy-metal contamination. This instrumentation grant will add to sediment mobility research through the measurement of decay products from naturally produced radioactive isotopes adsorbed to sediment. This instrument will help build a foundation for efforts to (1) create new datasets, (2) enhance infrastructure for interdisciplinary, collaborative research, and (3) train a diverse workforce capable of tackling society's environmental challenges through student training. Education impacts of this grant include the incorporation of the instrument into a new course and undergraduate student research projects through the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Measurement of fallout radionuclides provide a means to measure rates of surficial processes. Specifically, the short-lived beryllium nuclide 7Be can be used to understand the chemically similar 10Be radionuclide commonly used in surface-process research but typically only measured by more expensive accelerator mass spectrometry. Detection of the abundant short-lived beryllium radionuclide (7Be) via acquisition of a Canberra/Mirion U-Style Cryostat Small Anode Germanium (SAGe) Well Detector System will facilitate research into the mobility of cosmogenic 10Be and the adsorption behavior of 9Be, which is a toxic pollutant. The acquisition of this instrument will drive scientific research (some already NSF-funded) and innovation and cultivate interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers studying low-temperature geochemistry, marine geoscience, ecology, archaeology, and Earth-surface dynamics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.