Facilities – Climate and Paleoceanography

Seafloor Samples Laboratory

The Seafloor Samples Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is located in the McLean Laboratory on WHOI’s Quissett Campus. The collection contains more than 14,000 archived marine geological samples that have been carefully recovered from the seabed. The inventory includes long, stratified sediment cores, rock dredges, coral cores, surface grabs and samples collected by submersibles.

National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility (NOSAMS)

NOSAMS provides analyses of ¹⁴C at natural abundance levels to the ocean sciences research community.

Applications include dating of sedimentary deposits, studies of the sources of carbon-bearing materials in sediments and in the marine water column, studies of paleocirculation and ventilation (comparison of ¹⁴C differences between planktonic and benthic foraminifera, time series in corals), and detailed studies of circulation and carbon cycling in the modern ocean (three dimensional mapping of the distribution of ¹⁴C in dissolved inorganic carbon).

Plasma Mass Spectrometry Facility

The WHOI Plasma Mass Spectrometry (or ICPMS) Facility is a laboratory for trace element and isotope ratio measurements operated under the auspices of the W.H.O.I. Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department.

Our instruments include argon plasma source magnetic sector mass spectrometers equipped with a variety of sample introduction devices for gaseous, liquid and solid samples. We also provide analytical services that include sample preparation, element separation and purification for Sr, Nd and Pb isotope analyses.

Northeast National Ion Microprobe Facility (NENIMF)

The Northeast National Ion Microprobe Facility (NENIMF) was established at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by Nobumichi Shimizu in 1996. It is a multi-user facility specializing in Secondary Ionization Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), a powerful micro-analytical technique with broad applications to both earth and ocean sciences. The NENIMF specializes in in situ determinations of trace element abundances in minerals, glasses, biogenic carbonates and oxides, as well as industrial materials. We also carry out in situ determination of isotopic compositions of H, B, C, O, S, Cl, Pb in geological materials.

Paleo Mass Spectrometry

Organic Mass Spectrometry Facility

The Organic Mass Spectrometry Facility provides specialized, state-of-the-art analytical services using instruments which would be prohibitively expensive for any single investigator to develop, operate and maintain. This facility primarily serves members of the WHOI Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, but is available to all investigators at the Institution and, as time and resources permit, to other researchers outside of the Woods Hole community.

High Performance Compute Cluster (HPC)

The HPC at WHOI allows access to an institutional high-performance compute cluster and research data storage repository. The cluster operates on a fair share policy and is administered by the SLURM scheduler. The cluster is currently composed of 77 standard nodes (192 GB RAM, 36 cores per node), 1 shared-memory node (3 TB RAM and 80 cores), and one GPU node (4 Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs connected via NVLINK). PIs can purchase additional dedicated compute nodes. These dedicated nodes also serve as a scavenger queue when idle. The scavenger queue contains 58 nodes. The compute cluster is connected to the data storage repository via 100Gb/s Infiniband EDR.