LIRA - PANTHALASSA: a dual infrastructure to study the trace of radiogenic and environmental isotopes
Studying the chemical footprint of environmental pollution since the industrial revolution, tracking the carbon cycle in the deepest oceans, improving clinical diagnostic tools and identifying fraud cases in the food industry are some of the action fields of the laboratory LIRA - PANTHALASSA, an infrastructure in Catalonia in the analysis or radiogenic and environmental isotopes located in the Faculty of Earth Sciences and the Scientific and Technological Centers of the UB (CCiTUB), respectively.
Studying the chemical footprint of environmental pollution since the industrial revolution, tracking the carbon cycle in the deepest oceans, improving clinical diagnostic tools and identifying fraud cases in the food industry are some of the action fields of the laboratory LIRA - PANTHALASSA, an infrastructure in Catalonia in the analysis or radiogenic and environmental isotopes located in the Faculty of Earth Sciences and the Scientific and Technological Centers of the UB (CCiTUB), respectively.
LIRA-PANTHALASSA are leading support facilities on research in Spain and open next Thursday, June 13, at 12.15 noon, in an institutional event in the Aula Magna Carmina Virgili of the Faculty of Earth Sciences. Participants in this act are the vice-rector for research, Domènec Espriu; the director of CCiTUB, José Ramón Seoane; the dean of the Faculty, Albert Cases, and the director of the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, Miquel Canals.
During the event, the new equipment will be presented by the researchers Isabel Cacho and Leopoldo Pena, scientific supervisors of the dual infrastructure and members of the Consolidated Research Group (CRG) on Marine Geosciences of the UB. Then, the experts Jaime Williams, head of research and development of Nu-instruments; Carles Pelejero, researcher from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC), and professor Albert Soler, director of the Department of Mineralogy, Petrology and Applied Geology of the UB -will speak.
LIRA: a white room to process samples before isotopic analyses
The new Laboratory of Radiogenic and Environmental Isotopes (LIRA) is located in the third floor of the Faculty and its aim is to work on chemical preparation and process of all samples to be later analysed in the PANTHALASSA spectrometer.
“All samples have to be chemically purified in a white room before its isotopic analysis, and this first phase -which can last days- will be conducted in the LIRA spaces. The laboratory will be accessible to all the UB research groups and other institutions or centers that are interested in applying this methodology to their work”, notes Professor Isabel Cacho, from the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, awarded with an ICREA ACADEMIA 2018 award.
LIRA has been funded with aids from the European Research Council (ERC) -through one of the Consolidator Grants 2015 given to Professor Isabel Cacho-, the UB and other national projects. The laboratory will support research projects based on the study of variations in the composition of radiogenic isotopes -from the disintegration of radioactive isotopes- or environmental ones.
According to Leopoldo Pena, from the CRG on Marine Geosciences and the mentioned Department, “LIRA is an infrastructure with a great potential regarding the application of Earth Sciences-related disciplines, such as Oceanography, Paleoceanography, Geochronology, Petrology or Hydrology”.
“Also -he continues-, the study of these isotopic profiles has several applications in studies on the environment (isotopic tracers for pollutants), biomedicine (new diagnostic tools and disease monitoring), pharmacy, archaeology, physiology, nuclear industry, forensic sciences, quality control, etc.
LIRA is a white room with positive pressure atmosphere -with a control of the variables such as temperature and humidity- and metal-free to prevent samples from being polluted. It has three vertical laminar flow cabins -workstations- and two extractor cabinet, one of them exclusively dedicated to the in situ distillation of inorganic acids. It has four units for the evaporation of samples -with an additional air inlet filter- and an ultrapure water production system.
This ultraclean room is classified as ISO7 according to quality rules, and workstations are ISO5. “These quality certifications allow the development of the preparation of samples for the analysis of radiogenic isotopes -for instance, neodymium, strontium or lead- at trace levels”, note researchers Ester García-Solsona and Maria Jaume, from the CRG on Marine Sciences.
PANTHALASSA: from the great ancestral ocean to the study of isotopic relations
PANTHALASSA, whose name evokes the big ancestral ocean surrounding the supercontinent Pangea, is a multi-collector mass spectrometer (MC-ICPMS Plasma 3) in the Scientific and Technological Centers of the UB (CCiTUB). This equipment enables determining the isotopic relations of most of the elements in the periodic table, and with a high sensitivity in the analyses (between 10 and 100 per million).
According to the expert Eduardo Paredes (CRG on Marine Geosciences), “thanks to the sample introduction system -Aridus II dilutor- we can get high precision results on sample trace quantities (nanograms) and in about thirty minutes. The sample is introduced in a liquid state in the diluter and it gets to a plasm where the element is ionized and sampled”.
The combined action of an electric field and a magnetic one enables the separation of different isotopes of the element -according to its mass- which will be simultaneously detected in a series of devices that will help solve the enigma on the isotopic composition of the original sample.