Newcastle University > School of Geography, Politics and Sociology > About Us > About Geography > Geography Facilities

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)