Complete Fission Track dating facilities are available at the FU Berlin. We have a fully equipped mineral separation laboratory for concentrating apatite and zircon. Facilities for mounting, polishing, and etching samples are in collaboration with University of Potsdam. We host a Zeiss © Axioplan 2 microscope with a maximum magnification of 1250 x paired with a Drawing Board VI ©, stage control, LED courser mouse and the FT Stage © software for counting and length measurements. Data record and …

The lab is equipped with a Leica DMR microscope with a drawing tube, a Kinetek computer-driven stage, a Calcomp digitizing tablet, and FT Stage software. A video camera is mounted on the triaxial head of the microscope, allowing a group of people to observe a slide simultaneously. At present, we are only analyzing apatites. However, we plan on analyzing zircons in the future.

The laboratory for microscopy focuses on the specific requirements of microfacies analysis of lake sediments, but also offers a wide range of possibilities for other applications. Sedimentological, petrographic and microfacies analyses on all kinds of covered and uncovered thin sections and polished sections with transmitted and incident light are performed.

The microscopic analysis of microfossils or sedimentological specimens is part of the basic training in palaeontology. Microfossils are often not visible in the field with the naked eye or a magnifying glass. Nevertheless, in order to determine whether a rock contains microfossils, thin sections (slices of rock a few tenths to hundredths of a mm thick) are made from a rock sample, in which cross-sections of microfossils may be visible under the microscope. The microfossils can be obtained by …

The sedimentology lab at the Permafrost Research section aims to study the transport and accumulation processes of permafrost-related deposits and classify sediment sequences in general. Therefore, the following parameters are investigated: sediment structure description, grain-size distribution and mass specific magnetic susceptibility.