This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, supports the establishment of a repository for polar geological materials. The objective of this project is to construct and operate a Polar Rock Repository to serve the U.S. Antarctic and Arctic earth science community. This National Polar Rock Repository would house sample collections from Antarctica and the Arctic obtained by U.S. earth scientists through more than 40 decades of fieldwork, and provide for future needs. The United States does not currently have such a facility, and rock collections are scattered throughout the country, often in inadequate and uncurated storage. The rock collections would be catalogued and curated, and accessible to the U.S. earth science community and overseas colleagues, as well as being available for earth sciences educational purposes. All collection and appropriate analytical data will be stored in the on-line Antarctic Geologic Database recently designed by BPRC personnel and available via the Internet. The Database can be expanded to include Arctic rock and sedimentary core collections.
The award will help to support construction of a single-floor building with about 6,000 square feet of storage apace on The Ohio State University campus, adjacent to an already existing cold storage building that houses sediment cores and other samples, and adjacent to Scott Hall (site of laboratories and offices of the Byrd Polar Research Center). In Scott Hall, work rooms with rock saws and a drill press, wet laboratory/sample preparation facilities, microscope and photographic equipment are available for preliminary rock and fossil examination. The planning and construction phase is expected to take about two years. This award also supports a Curator and student help for the set-up and establishment phase of the National Polar Rock Repository following completion of construction.
Access to the collections will be possible by direct physical examination of the specimens by a visiting scientist, by loan/request of sample splits, and via the on-line Database. A National Steering Committee will provide input from the U.S. earth science community for this facility and will oversee policies, procedures and management.
Such a national storage and research facility is of vital importance for the continuing high quality research conducted by the U.S. It provides, along with a database of sample information, an essential resource for focused proposal preparation, and an invaluable source of material for future research that should make future fieldwork more efficient and effective by facilitating pilot studies and other sample-based research. This latter aspect could reduce environmental impacts in sensitive polar regions.
