MRI: Acquisition of LA-HR-ICPMS instrumentation for climate, environmental, ecosystem, and engineering research at the University of Maine

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This award is for acquisition of new instrumentation to support acquisition of the new LA-HR-ICPMS instrumentation for the trace-element analysis of various environmental samples. This instrumentation will replace the original (and heavily used over two decades) ThermoScientific Element2 ICP-MS installed at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute (CCI). The new acquisition will significantly expand research capabilities of the CCI/ICP-MS Facility to improve the analysis of aqueous samples, supplemented with a laser ablation (LA) front end for ice, biological, and other solid materials. The current ICP-MS Facility was established in 2002 with an NSF/MRI award, which since then has served as a vital resource for climate, environmental, ecosystem, and engineering research and training at the U. Maine, across the state of Maine and beyond. The routine use and primary support of the Facility come from the Principal Investigators and their collaborators that group under three research areas: glaciochemistry and climate/environmental reconstruction; paleoceanography and marine biogeochemistry; and environmental sensor development and material science engineering.The U. Maine is the State’s Land & Sea Grant university and only PhD granting institution, so the campus is the de facto academic research and research training hub of the state of Maine. The proposed advances of this research & training instrumentation will immediately impact current and future NSF-funded research projects that support extensive national and international collaborations. Specific to this proposal are collaborations with the University of Venice (Italy) and the University of Cambridge/British Antarctic Survey to develop laser ablation ICP-MS imaging of ice cores, and collaborations with New Zealand, Swiss, Chinese, Canadian, and Brazilian colleagues to analyze ice, thereby maintaining our leadership role in global ice core and climate change research. Likewise, the enhanced carbonate analysis capacity of the Element XR will have an immediate impact on NSF-funded research projects in the Gulf of Maine and in the South Pacific. The proposed instrumentation will facilitate new and important collaborations between academic colleges (College of Natural Science, Forestry, and Agriculture and the College of Engineering) and research units - the CCI and the Frontier Institute for Research in Sensor Technology - across the campus, as well as enabling new and broader scientific collaborations with other academic and scientific institutions across Maine.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.