The
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
is housed in Olin Building, nestled on
a wooded hillside on the western edge of
campus. Its facilities include instrumentation,
a departmental library, and modern computer
equipment. There are laboratories for experimental
petrology, crystallography, evolutionary
biology/ecology, and fluid and solid mechanics.
A JEOL 8600 electron
microprobe in Olin Building is available
to all members of the department. Numerous
computers and PC's provide in-house computational
capabilities and access to mainframe computers
elsewhere on campus. Olin Building also
contains equipment for modern petrographic
work (including a computer-controlled Buehler
image analysis system), and a laboratory
for sectioning rocks. There is also a substantial
collection of rocks, minerals and fossils.
Facilities are available for a wide spectrum
of fluid mechanical experiments, including
thermal convection and solidification.
Facilities for mineralogy and crystallography include two transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) and
modern specimen preparation laboratories.
The transmission electron microscopy laboratory
houses instruments capable of both
high-resolution imaging at the atomic cluster
scale and X-ray microanalysis of areas
a few tens of nanometers in diameter. Campus
facilites include instruments for single-crystal,
X-ray diffraction and focussed ion-beam
milling (FIB) for site-specific, TEM sample
preparation at the nanometer scale.
The hydrogeology laboratory
contains an IBM RS/6000 Model 560 mini-supercomputer
for numerical simulation experiments. Three
Silicon Graphics workstations are also
available for graphics and simulation applications.
A variety of small- and large-scale laser
printers, pen plotters, color plotters
and digitizer are attached to the workstation
equipment.
Field
studies and excursions form an integral
part of the program of instruction and
research in geology and are closely integrated
with the laboratory and course work. Situated
at the fall line between the Coastal Plain
and the Piedmont and only an hour's ride
from the Blue Ridge and Appalachians, Baltimore
is an excellent location for a department
with a field-oriented program in geology.
The department has a permanent field station
for geological research, Camp Singewald,
in the Bear Pond Mountains of Washington
County, Maryland, and a vehicle for field
use.
Supporting facilities
on campus include the Milton S. Eisenhower
Library, the Space Telescope Science Institute,
and the Computing Center. In addition,
the facilities of the Smithsonian Institution
and the Geophysical Laboratory and the
Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of
the Carnegie Institution of Washington
are available by special arrangement for
students qualified to use them. For students
whose research requires substantial computation,
special arrangements can be made to use
the supercomputers at the Goddard Space
Science Center (NASA) and the Naval Research
Laboratory.
