Equipment for your research

The Department of Geoscience is well-equipped for undergraduate instruction and research in a broad range of geologic disciplines.

Field Equipment

Geology student doing field researchOur field equipment includes: 

  • Brunton Compasses
  • Garmin GPSmap
  • Trimble Juno
  • PocketLab Air quality sensors
  • Two-way radios
  • Jacob's staffs
  • Neoprene and insulated waterproof nylon waders
  • Water testing instruments including: flow, turbidity, conductivity, and pH meters

We have Snowmeteric probes and kits for avalanche and snow science research. And, we have an Emriver Stream table to model river flow and surface morphology.

We also work closely with the Four Corners Water Resource Center. For more information, visit the Water Center website.

Field Laboratory Machinery

We maintain a collection of machines designed to prepare collected samples for analysis. This lab includes:

  • Slab and tile saws
  • Hillquist Thin Section Machine
  • Grinding and polishing wheels
  • Buehler Vibromet 2 polisher
  • Bico rock crusher
  • Essa LMI-P pulverizer
  • Chemplex SpectroMill-ll

Additionally, we have the ability to fuse glass beads in our Katanax Autofluxer Kl Prime or create briquettes in our Angstrom 4451AE Press.

Analytical Instruments

We also house several analytical instruments including:

  • Bruker S8 Tiger Xray Fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer
  • Bruker Tracer Sl Handheld XRF
  • Rigaku Miniflex600 X-ray Diffractometer (XRD)
  • JEOL Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE SEM) with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS or EDX) capabilities that we share with the Physics & Engineering Department.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Software and Related Equipment 

GIS software:

Current students taking GIS classes at FLC can download the latest version of ArcGIS Pro software from their ArcGIS Online settings page. Contact your GIS instructor for more information.

The department offers a GIS Certificate and supports research and internships focused on GIS.

Our mapping and surveying equipment includes:

  • Garmin GPSMAP 64s
  • Trimble Juno 3B
  • Topcon HiPer Lite Real-time Kinematic (RTK) GPS
  • Topcon GLS-2000 LiDAR Scanner
  • Multiple UAVs for 3-D mapping
  • Humminbird Helix 8 CHIRP MEGA SI+ Sonar
  • Two XP 9 HW - HELIX Dual Spectrum CHIRP In-Hull Transducers
  • Two Survery-Grade Emlid Reach RS2 RTK GPS

ArcGIS and QGIS software are installed on hundreds of Windows computers across campus. In addition, the department maintains three High Performance HP processing computers with Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40 GHz and 32 GB of RAM. College computer labs also have access to HP color printers and large-format plotters.