Redistribution of Scientific Ocean Drilling Cores Complete

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program repositories now house ODP and DSDP collections

All cores recovered through scientific ocean drilling under the auspices of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (1968-1983) and the Ocean Drilling Program (1983-2003) have been moved to the Gulf Coast Repository (GCR) in College Station, TX, the Bremen Core Repository (BCR) in Germany or the Kochi Core Center (KCC) in Japan. These three permanent archive locations are also the home to all cores taken by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (2003-present).

In a strategic move to realize efficiencies and save operations costs, IODP and the lead government funding agencies decided to redistribute the older collections of cores at two U.S. repositories. The East Coast Repository and West Coast Repository officially closed their doors on September 30, 2008. Long-term savings to IODP from storing cores in this way will top $300,000 per year. The redistribution was a three-year project.

The East Coast Repository at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University in Palisades, NY and the West Coast Repository at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, in La Jolla, CA housed archived cores for 40 years. Curation specialists at each institution ensured the quality and preservation of the cores, while fulfilling sample requests from the world’s scientists who used cores in their research.

With the start of IODP – and the associated expansion of the program’s reach and global partnerships – program curators established a new alignment scheme for storing cores based on their geographic origin. Cores from the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans (north of the Bering Strait) are housed at the BCR. The GCR houses cores from the Pacific Ocean (Pacific plate east of western boundary), the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and the Southern Ocean (south of 60° except Kerguelen Plateau). The KCC houses cores from the Pacific Ocean (west of western boundary of Pacific plate), the Indian Ocean (north of 60°), all of Kerguelen Plateau, and the Bering Sea. Cores recovered during DSDP and ODP are now stored according to this same distribution plan.

More information about the repositories and requesting samples is available here.

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