Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Revolutionary insights into the origins of the solar system and Earth's continents, oceans and early life forms is being gained from measuring the time and environmental information preserved in very small, almost dust-sized, mineral crystals in rocks and meteorites. Key to new and future research in these areas is the isolation of these tiny grains without destruction or contamination. Ultra low contamination mineral separation has traditionally been a painstaking process involving toxic heavy liquids and mechanical crushing with jaw crushers and disc mills requiring constant disassembly and cleaning. The crushing process can also destroy delicate mineral forms and shapes that otherwise provide new information on mineral growth rates and planetary environments. Faster, cleaner and less hazardous (i.e. no silica dust, heavy liquids) water-based methods have recently been developed commercially. These use electric pulses to shatter or disaggregate samples along mineral grain boundaries, eventually freeing crystals as wide as a human hair. This request is for a recently available, Canadian-made SPARK-3 Electric Pulse Disaggregation unit and accompanying HS-11 Hydroseparator system. The two units work in combination to perform micromineral separation without milling or heavy liquids at a rate approximately 5 times faster than with conventional methods. The equipment will fill a critical gap in the existing array of mineral separation equipment at UWO and partner institutions (University of Waterloo, University of Toronto) and result in increased throughput and research productivity with micromineral imaging equipment previously supported by NSERC (SEM-cathodoluminescence detector; Moser et al., NSERC-RTI 2006) and CFI (Moser, 2008).The processing speed and flexibility of the equipment will offer a significant advantage in the international race to answer fundamental questions such as; when did Earth's oceans and life forms first exist?