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IRVINE — A $2 million grant will build the first facility nationwide dedicated to carbon research on global warming, the University of California, Irvine announced. 

The W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles gave UCI’s School of Physical Sciences the grant. It is exceeded at the school only by a $6-million donation received in July to build a state-of-the-art research facility. The mass accelerator spectrometry facility will allow researchers to study environmental processes that determine atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Excessive carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect and global warming. The accelerator will allow researchers to run a larger number of samples at lower cost, which will dramatically hasten critical research. 

The school’s Department of Earth System Science will establish a regional research center to be used by scientists from UCI, California Institute of Technology, California State University, Fullerton, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and elsewhere. 

UCI researchers Ellen Druffel and Susan Trumbore, along with John Southon of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will oversee the facility, set to be operational by early 2002.