- Campuses :
- Twin Cities
- Crookston
- Duluth
- Morris
- Rochester
- Other Locations
LacCore has operated the National Lacustrine Core Repository since 2000, and now curates nearly 13,000 meters of core from the 1800 holes at more than 600 sites worldwide. The largest contributors (by core volume) are the nine lake drilling projects with archived cores; but small-volume projects paradoxically dwarf the larger ones, outnumbering the drilling campaigns by a factor of nearly 40. The vast majority of the curated materials are moist, cylindrical cores split in half, but unsplit cores, grab samples, dry cores, and a rapidly-growing number of freeze cores and permafrost cores round out the collection. The Repository also curates unused subsamples and sample residues for re-distribution and analysis. Currently, utilization of refrigerated storage space is at ~65% capacity, dry storage is at ~30%, and frozen storage is nearly full despite a recent expansion, as critical improvements to freeze coring and processing techniques have increased the appeal of these methods. In addition to these physical holdings, LacCore captures metadata for all materials moving through the Facility; thus cores stored at other institutions are integrated among the physical holdings for the purpose of data discovery. In total, the repository holds information for more than 3200 holes from over 1100 sites.
Metadata for the entire (physical and virtual) collection are made available for discovery through multiple means. Online tables with a selection of metadata and equivalent spreadsheet files for download are regularly updated on the LacCore website, and from these a .kml file is generated that allows geographical views and searches through the holdings with Google Earth software. LacCore also continues the process of transferring both project metadata and data generated at the Facility (core images, multisensor logs, core description sheets) to the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples, an online database and permanent virtual archive of sea floor and lakebed samples sponsored by NGDC and NSF to help researchers locate existing samples.
The LacCore core collection is available in numerous different formats: CSV, KML and plain old text searchable in any browser.
To submit a sample request, please fill out all necessary LacCore Forms. All necessary information on requests can be found on the sample requests page.