Baton Rouge Mass Spectrometer Installation

The Wetland Biogeochemistry Analytical Services, part of the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, has just taken delivery of a suite of Sercon instruments. The HS2022 system was installed last month by Senior Field Service & Installation Engineer Dave Harris.

Manager of the lab, Thomas Blanchard, MS, Chemist (Tommy) and Song Li, PhD will mainly be running 15N + 13C combustion samples (Wet land samples from the swamps of Louisiana) on their IsoEArth and looking at 15N & 13C from various location atmospheric samples on the CryoPrep (from N2 & CO2 direct from air). In the future they also plan to begin studies for 15N & 18O (on N2O) & 13C (on CH4) from atmospheric/Headspace samples.

Along with colleagues, Tommy has used Sercon IRMS in the past, but the old instruments had been decommissioned and the decision was made that new Sercon instruments offered the best way forward.

Tommy will be retiring in a few months and Song, originally from China, who he trained, will take over at that point as the new head of the lab.

In Dave’s spare time in Baton Rouge, an old town by the Mississippi, he tried some of the local food and did a spot of karaoke in the local Irish Bar.

He happened to be there during the week of the semi-final between England and Argentina, which he watched in a sports bar with Tommy. “All was great until the last few minutes when I was crying into my fried alligator.”

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