OSU Marine and Geology Repository

Corvallis, Oregon

The National Science Foundation awarded OSU with curatorial stewardship of the Antarctic core collection, one of the world’s premier marine geology collections. This archive of sediment cores is critical to the understanding of the Earth system, both past and present, and will continue to be essential to future studies. The cores provide a record of the Earth’s climate for the past millions of years, revealing oceanic conditions, changes in the magnetic field, and the history of plate tectonics, volcanic and seismic events, ice ages and interglacial periods, and organic life. OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS) co-located and co-managed the Antarctic core collection with its current collection in a single modern repository and analytical facility. The combined collection contains more than 30 km (or 19 miles) of refrigerated sediment core from the world’s oceans.

The OSU Marine and Geology Repository occupies the former Nypro Building, an injection molding facility, in Corvallis. Containing one of the largest sediment sample collections in the West, the renovated, 95,000-sf facility includes a 32-person seminar room, a 1,044-sf core lab, 10 adjoining analytical laboratories, and 18,000-sf of cold storage. When earth sciences researchers from around the world come to collaborate on research and findings with CEOAS, on-site equipment—core splitters, imagery, microscopy, rock analysis, sediment analysis CT scanning, among other devices—allow investigation and discovery. Graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students also have incredible access to scientific and experiential learning opportunities.

Rowell Brokaw worked with an integrated design team to develop this world-class research facility. This was a unique project for the refrigeration design/build contractors because the infrastructure and envelope for the cold storage facility are fully encapsulated within an existing building.