SPCMSC Core Archive

Photograph of the SPCMSC Core Laboratory’s storage stacks. The SPCMSC Core Laboratory is an archive that houses a collection of nearly 3,000 cores collected by the center and Federal, State, and university partners. These cores have been sampled from diverse study areas including coral reefs, wetlands, beaches, and marine environments from around the world. The USGS and partners study these cores to understand the geomorphological and climatic history of the Nation’s coastal and marine environments. The center’s data management group maintains the SPCMSC Geologic Core and Sample Viewer—a database of information on core samples in the archive, including the field collection site, archive storage location, associated publications, photographs, analytical results, and whether the core is still physically present in the archive.