Geoscience Facilities

The Department of Earth and Environmental Geoscience is housed in state-of-the-art facilities of the Science Center. Our “quarters” include a clustered arrangement of faculty offices and laboratories, a dedicated departmental computer laboratory, student research offices for geoscience majors. These facilities were specifically designed to promote student-faculty collaboration in a collegial setting.

IQ Center

The HHMI-funded Integrative and Quantitative Center houses a stereo 3D lab, a physical/mechanical lab, a computer visualization lab, and 5 microscopy suites.

Field and Analytical Equipment

For a small department within a liberal arts college, the Department of Geology at Washington and Lee has extensive geochemical, geophysical and geologic equipment. Laboratory equipment includes an Ion Chromatograph, XRD, SEM (with EBSD/EDS), Stable Isotope and other standard geochemical laboratory equipment.

In addition, we have a full rock/thin section preparation lab, optical microscopes, and supporting equipment. We have a field seismic acquisition unit, imaging resistivity unit, gravimeter, and magnetometer. In lab classes and for research students also use a vibracore, total station units, laser rangefinder, differential GPS with external antennae, and several meters for water sampling. To facilitate field work we have three twelve passenger vans.

Computing in the Earth and Environmental Geoscience Department

The Department of Earth and Environmental Geoscience has its own computing laboratory exclusively for the use by students in the department. 10 multicore workstations running Windows 10 are well endowed with large amounts of RAM, large disks, and two large screens connected to each machine to facilitate manipulation of graphical information. Accessory devices include a large-format color plotter/printer, as well as other printers and scanners. The department has its own dedicated 10-terabyte fileserver. We also have full access to the general computing facilities, and Integrative Quantitative Center at Washington and Lee that has multiple 3D printers and cutters.

Software is extensive in the department including GIS and image processing software ArcGIS, several geophysical modeling and interpretation packages, Matlab for scientific computing, and photogrammetry software Metashape. The department has received generous donations from IHS of their Kingdom Suite for 2-D/3-D seismic and well log interpretation, from dGB Earth Sciences of their OpendTect seismic interpretation system, from Paradigm Emerson of their Gocad geologic modeling package, and from Blue Marble Geographics for their GIS/Lidar package Global Mapper.

W&L Library

The University Libraries have many resources specific for Earth and Environmental Geoscience.