Division facilities
Analytical Facility
Analytical facilities in the GPS division are available to the campus on a fee basis. Both instrument time and operator services are available. Analytical services are provided to other colleges and universities, and under certain conditions, off campus analytical work is accepted from corporations, government labs, non-profit organizations, and individuals.
PMA/GPS Instrument Shop
The PMA/GPS Instrument Shop is an eight-man machine shop staffed to help design and fabricate mechanical, optical and infrared instrumentation.
GIS Laboratory
The Geographic Information System (GIS) Laboratory provides remote sensing, 3D modeling and other geographic information system resources for researchers within the division.
GPS Library
Part of the Caltech Library System, the Geological and Planetary Sciences Library collects materials in the fields of earth and planetary geology, geophysics, geochemistry, seismology, and paleontology. It is especially strong in materials dealing with California, the western United States, and North America. A depository for the publications of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the California Division of Mines and Geology (CDMG), the library also collects relevant publications from state geological surveys and from selected foreign surveys. Special collections include: geologic field trip guidebooks of western North America (with an emphasis on the area between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains), USGS topographic maps of the western United States, USGS geologic maps of California (including those published as USGS Open-File Reports), CDMG Open-File Reports, and Caltech Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences theses.
Paleomagnetics Laboratory
The Caltech Paleomagnetics/Biomagnetics clean lab facilities are housed in four rooms in the sub-basement of the Arms building on the Caltech campus. Two of these rooms are large-volume, magnetically-shielded environments, one dedicated for general paleomagnetic measurements and the other for biomagnetic and rock magnetic measurements. A third room is a general-purpose, wet chemical lab with primitive facilities for DNA sequencing and tissue culture research. The fourth room houses the main computing equipment for the group, a dark room and student desks.
Center for Microanalysis
The newly established Center for Microanalysis at Caltech houses two Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) instruments, also known as ion microprobes. The Cameca IMS 7f-GEO is a magnetic sector SIMS instrument based on the Cameca IMS 7f, but modified for geoscience applications. The Cameca NanoSIMS 50L is a type of ion microprobe designed for elemental and isotopic analysis of ultra-fine features (with spatial resolutions down to ~50 nm). It also offers extremely high sensitivity at high mass resolution and the capability of simultaneously measuring up to seven masses from the same small volume. The combination of these two state-of-the-art ion microprobes in one laboratory provide powerful diverse capabilities in trace and isotope analysis, depth profiling, ion imaging and geochronology, with low detection limits, high spatial resolution, and/or high precisions.
Seismological Laboratory
The Seismological Laboratory—informally known as the Seismo Lab—is a modern geophysical observatory that emphasizes the acquisition, analysis, and modeling of data pertaining to the structure and dynamics of the earth as well as other planetary bodies. This data originates from many sources including regional and global seismic networks, inhouse analytic facilities (e.g., high pressure mineral physics), oceanic research cruises, remote sensing (e.g., GPS, interferometric radar, Landsat etc.), and geologic field mapping. Current Seismo Lab research incorporates all aspects of geophysics and earthquake geology including, but not limited to, regional crustal structure, the physics of earthquakes, the structure, chemistry, and convective flow of the earth's interior, oceanic and continental tectonics, and lithospheric deformation.
Tectonics Observatory
The Tectonics Observatory was established with the ultimate goal of providing a new view of how and why the earth's crust and lithosphere are deforming over timescales ranging from a few tens of seconds, the typical duration of an earthquake, to tens of million of years.
Off-campus facilities
Division members may obtain access to JPL, the USGS Pasadena field office, off-campus telescopes and other facilities.
