Facility

Dredged Rock Collection

Our dredged rock and special collections are located at an off-campus facility, which is located on 10203 Pomerado Road, just east of the I-15. There we have a butler building that has 9000 square feet of space to house our rock collections, called the Marine Geology Collections Building. The space is filled with pallet racking and cabinets. The rocks that are being kept in our conventional wooden dredge boxes are now being stored on pallets, with ten boxes per pallet.  Our more delicate collections are being stored in cabinets within the same building. Samples are accessible for sampling and we are working on making all associated physical sample data for every sample in the collection available in an online database.

Cored Sediments Collection and Geological Collection Spaces

Our cored sediments collection and core labs are located in Deep Sea Drilling parking lot on SIO's main campus. There, we have our main lab space that is our “clean” lab where we have our x-ray machines for imaging and scanning cores for chemical content and large lab tables for sampling/working with cores. Attached to the main lab are two large cold storage rooms. One is used for miscellaneous material, such as core tops, grab samples and unsplit cores, while the other houses our entire conventional core collection in chronological order. In addition, we have our “dirty” lab, which is in the building just south of the main lab where we can split cores, cut and polish rocks, curate new material, take samples and store material that does not need to be refrigerated. This is also where we keep our updated core splitter that cuts both sides of the core liner simultaneously and makes for much clean and efficient core splitting. Upstairs in the Deep Sea Drilling East building, we have a library that contains all of the ship logs, sampling logs and descriptive logs that are in hard copy form for associated core and dredge samples, as well as a full suite of books that relate to marine geology and the oceanographic sciences.

Teaching Collection

Our teaching collection is located in the basement of Ritter Hall. We have three connected rooms to house our most interesting samples to be used in classroom and lab activities. These samples range from the freshest basalts, to beautifully cleaved quartz crystals, to microfossil collections that track evolutionary changes, to a walrus fossil from the Chula Vista formation, to olivine-rich peridotite, and much more. The identifying information associated with each sample in the teaching collection (i.e. place of origin, collection date, approximate age, type of rock, etc…) is also being entered into a database and a card with this information is being printed and stored with each sample in its drawer or cabinet so visitors to the teaching collection can easily learn about any and all samples of interest.