The British Geological Survey (BGS) has today published an online database of freely viewable and downloadable Marine Geoscience Data, available through the Offshore GeoIndex, covering the whole UK Continental Shelf. It holds approximately 80,000 sampling locations that have a range of valuable geochemical, geological, geotechnical and sediment data including PDF files of legacy scanned data sheets and borehole logs. Offshore data like these are important for research into areas such as carbon storage, energy resources, planning, habitat mapping and conservation.
BGS
“Geology isn’t just under our feet; it’s under our seas too. We want this data to benefit the whole geoscience community by aiding research and inspiring new spinout products.” said Bob Gatliff, BGS Director of Energy & Marine Geoscience. “The marine environment is an ever increasingly important area of scientific study as it is worth more than £48.6 billion to the UK economy, which is predicted to double by 2030. At 3.5 times the UK land mass, it is an area with vast economic and environmental potential”.
Until now these Marine Geoscience Data have been an internal BGS resource used to underpin our range of Digital Information Products*, which are made available via MAREMAP** and the BGS website. As part of the BGS OpenGeoscience initiative the data have today been made available to the public and the Marine community to use under an Open Government Licence (OGL).
The data have been collected as part of the BGS regional and local mapping programme as well as from third-parties. Included in the data are around 33 thousand sediment data records, 18 thousand geochemical values and core photos of 8000 Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) offshore hydrocarbon wells.
A detailed over view of all the data available, together with other useful information, can be found online here.