Alec Deslandes

Biography

Dr. Alec Deslandes has been involved in building and testing the first facilities in Australia to measure noble gases and radioactive noble gases in water samples. A brief snapshot includes: fields trips, sampling, measuring environmental tracers with our state of the art analysis systems of which there are only a handful in the world, and analysing the data to build conceptual models of Australia’s aquifers and hydrological systems. Reports and publications of Alec’s work have developed knowledge and understanding of processes of environmental systems across Australia. They have informed water security planning, regional and project developments, and dependencies of environmental systems.

Recent advancements were made in the field of:

• development and operations of automated noble gas preparation systems for environmental samples including groundwater, soil gas and mineral samples
• development and build of Tritium Facility via Helium ingrowth (Trifin) to diversify Australia’s capability in characterising water on the age-scale of decades
• operations of multi-collector noble gas mass spectrometry (Helix-MC) to measure noble gas isotopes
• development, build and use of robust and portable equipment for large volume (50 L) sampling of dissolved gases from water samples with membrane contactor technology for rare noble gas isotopes (radiokrypton and radioargon)
• processing large volumes of dissolved gases extracted from water via gas chromatography for microL of purified Kr
• use of noble gases to characterise groundwater systems of carbon sequestration and repository sites, including analytical tools for identifying connectivity and leaks
• use of noble gas isotopes for quantifying for how long rock fluids have been isolated from the hydrological cycle.

Alec joined CSIRO in 2015 after a post-doctoral fellowship at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and Centre for Accelerator Science, during which he developed and applied instrumentation and methods for measuring light elements in materials. This included experiments at the Australian Synchrotron and the ANU MAGnetized Plasma Interaction Experiment (MAGPIE).