Facilities
The Earth Sciences building is laid out in a way intended to maximise the effectiveness and delivery of research. Academic staff, PDRAs and PhD students) are located on Level 3 of the Earth Sciences building. Academic staff are assigned individual, glass-fronted offices (typically 14.5m2) which open onto two large open plan areas (164m2 each) where their postgraduate students have desks, whilst postdoctoral researchers are housed in two spacious (141m2) multi-occupancy offices at either end of the building. The co-location of staff, postdocs and students, ranging from professors to first year PhD students, lends itself naturally to the development of a collegial and mutually-supportive research environment. Research support and administrative staff are accommodated on Level 2, which includes four large teaching and seminar spaces (704m2 total), whilst technical staff are housed on Level 1 where the main research equipment facilities (listed below) are located in purpose-built laboratories (occupying 1004m2 in total).
- Ocean-Bottom Instrumentation Consortium (OBIC) - a collaboration between the University's of Durham, Southampton and Imperial College which aims to provide a national equipment facility of state-of-the-art, versatile and adaptable seabed instrument platforms bespoke configured to suit a broad range of sub-seabed geophysical investigations to support international academic and commercial research activities. Prof. Peirce
- Northern Centre for Isotopic and Elemental Tracing (NCIET) – A major equipment centre that comprises the Arthur Holmes Isotope Geology Laboratory, The Thermo Electron Mass Spectrometry Suite, the Stable Isotope laboratory and the Elemental Analysis Laboratory. The centre focuses on using radiogenic and stable isotope analyses together with a wide range of elemental geochemistry to date, trace and quantify geological, environmental and biological processes. We undertake a wide variety of commercial analytical services. Prof. Burton & Dr Macpherson
- Durham Terrestrial Laser Scanning facility (DuTLS). This unique facility includes a world-leading array of terrestrial laser scanners that enable high speed, high resolution geospatial data acquisition for cross-disciplinary research. Dr McCaffrey
- Rock mechanics CCS facilities
- Earth Imaging
- Microscopy laboratory
- Rock Sectioning Laboratory – The Department hosts a fully equipped modern laboratory for cutting and sectioning of rocks, minerals, fossils and other solids. Commercial work is undertaken. Ian Chaplin.
