OSU Marine and Geology Repository featured in the Corvallis Gazette-Times

Oregon State University Marine and Geology Repository co-directors Anthony Koppers, left, and Joe Stoner look at a pair of sediment samples on Friday during a tour of the newly renovated and expanded facility. The repository houses more than 22 miles of oceanic sediment cores and tens of thousands of marine rock specimens. (Photo: Andy Cripe, Mid-Valley Media)

The core of the matter: OSU unveils state-of-the-art facility for storing and studying geological samples

Article in the Corvallis Gazette-Times

By Bennett Hall
Corvallis Gazette-Times
January 31, 2020

Sometimes the keys to the future can be found in the past.

That’s one of the core principles (pun intended) of Oregon State University’s Marine and Geology Repository, which holds one of the nation’s largest collections of oceanic sediment cores.

OSU began assembling its holdings in the 1970s and at one time stored some of its sensitive core samples in the walk-in refrigerator of a Corvallis Chinese restaurant, but the collection has grown steadily since those early days.

Last year it doubled in size when the National Science Foundation transferred stewardship of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean National Collection of Rock and Sediment Cores, previously held at Florida State University, to OSU.

To properly store its burgeoning collections, Oregon State spent $5.8 million renovating 33,000 square feet of a former manufacturing plant in the Sunset Research Park, located about a mile from campus at 4700 SW Research Way, and on Friday the university opened the state-of-the-art facility to the public.

The OSU Marine and Geology Repository is one of just four National Science Foundation-supported repositories in the country and the only one on the West Coast, making it a major hub for research, said co-director Joe Stoner, a professor of paleomagnetism and marine geology in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.

“OSU is now the second-largest NSF-supported collection in the country,” Stoner said, after the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository at Columbia University in New York. “But ours has the most refrigerated space, so our cores are in better shape.”

Each core sample starts out as a long cylinder, which is cut into 5-foot sections. Each section is then cut in half the long way, with one half designated for research and the other set aside to be permanently archived. Holding the sediment cores in cold storage helps keep them from drying out, molding or suffering chemical degradation, Stoner explained.

The OSU repository holds more than 10 miles’ worth of deep sea sediment cores gathered from 6,300 sites primarily in the Pacific Ocean, stored in the form of 5-foot segments on tall racks of shelves in the climate-controlled warehouse, which is kept at a steady 38 degrees Fahrenheit. The facility holds an additional 11½ miles of sediment cores from 7,300 sites around Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean (the former Florida State collection).

A pair of freezers set at a frigid 28 degrees below zero hold OSU’s collection of ice cores. Other parts of the building hold samples of rocks dredged up from the ocean floor and a collection of rock core samples drilled in Oregon.

There are also labs for analyzing rock and core samples, as well as office and classroom space.

But what the OSU Marine and Geology Repository really holds is knowledge — knowledge about the Earth’s ancient past.

Some of the ice cores in the repository are 800,000 years old; the oldest sediment cores date back tens of millions of years; and some of the marine rocks in the collection are more than 100 million years old.

“The oldest rocks I’ve dated in my lab are 167 million years old,” said the repository’s other co-director, Anthony Koppers, a professor of marine geology in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences who specializes in calculating the age of ancient rocks.

Because they go so far back in time, the samples comprise a rich storehouse of data about the planet’s inner workings — from the chemical composition of ancient atmospheres to pieces of the fossil record, chronicles of glacial movement, shifts in magnetic orientation and countless other pieces of information that scientists can make use of.

“There’s a lot of different research spun around the collection that we can do,” Koppers said.

One way researchers are making use of the collection, Stoner said, is to examine sediment outflows from the Columbia River from a time in the distant past when the climate was warming, as it is today. By closely studying those ancient sediments, scientists may be able to more accurately forecast the long-range effects of the current episode of global warming.

“Models predict in the future we might be wetter than we are now, but this gives us an example from nature that we can study,” he said.

“It gives us a perspective on how the Earth works that we really can’t get any other way,” Stoner added. “I think of geology as the solutions manual for the Earth.”

And the collection is not just for Oregon State University researchers. Scientists from all over the world come to Corvallis to examine rock, ice and core samples. They can also request that OSU ship them samples of specific cores for study in their own labs.

Scientists affiliated with other institutions can also send their core samples to OSU for storage in the repository, which helps expand the collection further — and expand its value for research. And there’s plenty of room for more growth. The facility was designed with an estimated 50 years’ worth of expansion space.

“That’s why NSF funds us,” Koppers said. “We are basically taking care of cores that NSF owns.”

The National Science Foundation gave Oregon State an $810,000 grant to cover the cost of moving the Antarctic and Southern Ocean core collection from Florida State University, according to figures provided by OSU. Ongoing federal support for the repository includes an additional $2.9 million in NSF funding and a $400,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Now OSU is embarking on a project to make its collections even more widely accessible. The university is converting all the paper records of samples stored in the collection into digital form that can be accessed over the internet, creating a virtual card catalog of all the samples in the repository.

The next phase in the project will involve photographing the core samples and analyzing their physical properties and digitizing that information to create a complete database of the repository’s holdings that would be accessible to researchers and curious members of the public.

Samples are labeled with QR codes that enable a smartphone link to the collection database.

“It goes to our system, and you can see all the information on it,” Koppers said. “We’re building an app.”