Liverpool Isotope Facility (LIFER)

The Liverpool Isotope Facility for Environmental Research (LIFER) was established in 2010 and contains state-of-the-art instrumentation for the analysis of stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen in solid, liquid and gaseous organic and inorganic chemicals. The mine of information stored in these chemicals lead to this branch of stable isotope geochemistry being a valuable tool in geology, oceanography, marine ecology, palaeoceanography and palaeolimnology, archaeology and the life sciences.

The equipment

The facility has three stable isotope mass spectrometers

Three Stable isotope ratio mass-spectrometers

Carbonates are dissolved in acid and liberated CO2 is purified and analyzed off line.

The multipurpose instrument is capable of analyzing both solids and gases. Most of our work focuses on organic materials, from bear hair to serpentinized rocks and the determination of the isotopic composition of seawater nitrate.