New facilities to help power Herty

Scheduled to open within the next year, the new L-shaped addition to Herty Hall, called “Phase ?”, possess many benefits, one of them being an emergency power wiring throughout the entire the hall.

Associate professor and coordinator of Pre-professional Programs in the Biological and Environmental Sciences Department Dr. Mike Gleason highlighted the importance of temperature control for safety reasons.

“(The emergency power lines) puts us up to par with other major institutions,” Gleason said.

Having the emergency power back up, with the help of the Plant Operations & Facilities Planning Department, means temperature control should be less of an issue.

Without the additions, in the case of loss of power, many experiments on living organisms and specimens could be adversely affected.

Ultra-cold freezers and refrigeration systems are home to many yeasts, DNA samples and various kinds of cells. Costing around $10,000 each, the freezers’ temperatures have to be approximately minus 80 degrees Celsius (dry ice temperature) because professors and researchers need the cells in frozen form. Zach Dekner, a sophomore biology major, noted the importance of the temperature regulations.

“We can store stuff, work on them, and put them back,” Dekner said.

Because the departments rely on power for the specialized freezers, a power outage could be devastating to research and future experiments.

“(The ultra-cold freezers) preserves them, rather than if you have to grow them,” Gleason said. “It can be very time consuming, but we save a lot of money.”

Each room in Herty also features negative pressure.

“The air is always coming into the room and being sucked out, so if there is a spill or something that gets in the room, it doesn’t go out to the general population,” Gleason said.

Over half of the professors in the Biology department specialize in paleontology, and as such, GCSU has an impressive record of fossils.

The first floor of Herty contains a federally licensed fossil depository.

The storage compactor system is home to over 100,000 fossils found throughout the United States, including South Dakota, Alaska and Georgia. They are displayed in the fossil depository.

“(Herty houses) one of the best fossil depositories, if not the best, in the Southeast,” Gleason said.

The additions to Herty should help to improve the fossil depository as well. This is a humidity and temperature controlled room. If temperature started to fluctuate or the humidity got too high in this area, partially fossilized specimens could be greatly affected.

“Some of the fossils are well preserved and others are not completely fossilized, so that they would start to degenerate (if this were to occur),” Gleason said.

As an associate professor in the Biological and Environmental Sciences Department, Dr. Alfred Mead knows that the fossil depository is dependent on many things the construction will provide, such as temperature control and more sources of electrical power.

“They definitely serve as a record for biodiversity,” Mead said.

Home for many mammal fossils such as walruses, mammoths and bears, the depository is arranged by geologic periods. The sizes of fossils vary from large mammoth ribs to as small as a full body shrew skeleton.

“We have a very strong modern collection,” Mead said.

During spring break a few years ago, due to lack of power, the refrigeration systems in Herty malfunctioned and began to warm up resulting in horrible smelling fossil specimens after the break.

Mead emphasized that because of loss of power, specimens can continue their deteriorating processes and no longer can complete fossilization thus resulting in a loss of a fossil.

“It’s like, when are you going to get another rhino?” Mead said.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 30 2009. Filed under Health & Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry