Alaska Geologic Materials Center

A vision for responsible stewardship (brochure)

The Alaska Geologic Materials Center (GMC) is the central repository in which geologic materials collected from Alaska are cataloged, stored, and studied. The center is permanently maintained and managed by the State of Alaska under cooperative agreements with other agencies (U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Minerals Management Service, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission) and support from private industry.

The GMC houses nonproprietary rock core and cuttings that represent nearly 12 million feet of exploration and production drilling from Federal, State, and private lands of Alaska, including the Alaska outer continental shelf. The GMC collection includes rock materials from more than 1,415 oil and gas wells, rock core from more than 1,071 exploratory hard-rock mineral holes, and surface samples. There are 211,700 feet of diamond-drilled hard rock mineral core at the facility. The collection also includes extensive geochemical data, porosity/permeability data, petrographic thin sections, and micropaleo glass slides derived from this rock.

An inventory of the GMC collection is available on CD; contact GMC staff for availability. Signifigant work is underway to build a web-based catalog that will allow geographic and simple text searches for all the physical sample holdings of the GMC. Click here for a listing of mineral industry related sample locations.