Geography Facilities
We offer a range of brand-new state-of the-art facilities and specialist equipment for use in both Geography teaching and research.
Our brand-new state-of-the-art laboratories form part of the One Planet project and are used for a combination of teaching and research activities. These include:
- the Project Lab, commonly used by physical geography students for dissertation research
- the Houston Lab which is a large multidisciplinary teaching lab
- the Sediment Teaching Lab
- the Sediment Research Lab
Our research specific laboratories comprise of Organic Geochemistry, Palaeoecology, and Cosmogenic Isotope labs.
We also have two walk-in cold rooms for sample storage, three outside storage facilities and a hilux 4-wheel drive vehicle.
Field equipment
Field equipment includes a range of technologies for:
- topographic survey (levels, handheld GPS, robotic total station, laser range-finders and Leica-differential GPS)
- soil and sediment sampling (corers and augers for inorganic and organic sediment, gravity and piston corers for use in lakes)
- biological and chemical analysis (aquatic kick nets, ysi water column chemistry sonde, portable hach-lange spectrophotometers, ultra-meters)
- hydrological analysis (including stage recorders, rugged digital cameras and multi-parameter probes)
We also have several boats and a UWITEC coring platform.
Links with facilities in other schools
In addition to the above facilities, we have strong links with Civil Engineering and Geosciences where we have additional access to a wide range of both standard and specialised field and analytical equipment.
This includes:
- rock crushing equipment
- total organic carbon (TOC) analysers
- gas chromatography (GC)
- gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (GCMS)
- high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
- liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LCMS)