Written by Dale Granger Thursday, 16 July 2009 12:27
A NEW Stable Isotope Facility Laboratory at The University of Western Australia is opening doors for exciting research initiatives ranging from improved water management and the formation of gold deposits to identification of illegal ivory and corals.
Part of the John de Laeter Centre of Excellence, this facility was made possible with funding from the Australian Research Council, UWA and the John de Laeter Centre.
“We were using old equipment that was coming to the end of its life with limited capacity. Now the lab has almost tripled in size,” says Dr Pauline Grierson, director of the WA Biogeochemistry Centre.
In a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, the new isotope ratio mass spectrometer is the focal point of the lab, where researchers will primarily be analysing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.
This will be used by mining companies for data on mineral deposits, marine biologists investigating ocean pollution, ecohydrologists evaluating the water fluxes of aquifers, and rivers and medical researchers the composition of blood plasma.
In conjunction with the Department of Water, researchers at UWA and CSIRO are already using the facility to establish whether nitrogen and carbon compositions in the Swan and Canning Rivers have natural or human origins.
“We can use the lab for anything from research into turtle and bird migrations to feeding behaviour up and down the west coast or whale feeding in the Antarctic. My own work is related to understanding the ecological water requirements of vegetation,” says Dr Grierson.
Dr Renae Hovey recently completed her PHD researching whether sea grass, 80 percent of which has eroded due to industry and sewage off Cockburn Sound, would see regeneration occur with provision of nutrients.
“The plants absorb the nutrients, but there was no improvement in regeneration.”
Dr Daniel Murphy, UWA Soil Biology group leader, says previous isotope analysis had to be outsourced to facilities in the eastern states or even overseas.
“It takes a lot of time and money to collect precious research samples and you don’t want
them to get lost in the mail or deal with quarantine issues.
“Now, with this specialised equipment, we can gain a lot of confidence being able to interact directly with operators in the lab calibrating machines to get high quality data. This can be applied to greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, i.e. tracing gas components from fertilizer, to post-mining rehabilitation of forests.”
