EPSS Colloquium spring-2018

On March 24, 1993, the Dept. of Earth & Space Sciences held a party attended by the head of the NSF’s Instrumentation & Facilities Program for Earth Sciences, the Vice Chancellor for Research, board members of the W.M. Keck Foundation, the president/principal owner of CAMECA, as well as ESS and IGPP faculty & staff. The occasion for celebration was the opening of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Isotope Geochemistry with its centerpiece the CAMECA ims 1270, the northern hemisphere’s first high-sensitivity, high-resolution ion microprobe (or secondary ion mass spectrometer, SIMS). Speeches were made, toasts given, and a demonstration performed (not without some problems, as it turned out). Following an intensive multi-year period of instrument and technique development, the laboratory was commissioned as a National Facility under the direction of Prof. T. Mark Harrison along with co-I’s Prof. Mary Reid and laboratory manager, Specialist Kevin McKeegan. Our intention, as articulated in that and eight subsequent NSF proposals, was “to create a world-class facility for in situ microscale isotopic analyses of geologic materials and to provide access to its unique capabilities to the broader community to address important problems in earth and planetary science.” Now with a perspective of 25 years, I will present some of the challenges and benefits of running a National Facility and highlight several significant accomplishments of the UCLA Keck lab in addressing a wide range of problems in geochronology, geochemistry, and cosmochemistry. The potential of the new $5M ion microprobe, the UCLA/CAMECA ims 1290, for enabling further advancements in high resolution studies of planetary materials will also be discussed.