About the GCR

The Gulf Coast Repository (GCR) is funded by the National Science Foundation and has served the scientific ocean drilling community since 1985. The GCR is located on the Texas A&M University campus, at 1000 Discovery Drive, College Station, Texas 77845.

The GCR stores and curates 151 kilometers of Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), and International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) cores collected from below the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and the Southern Ocean. Cores from other oceans are stored at the Bremen Core Repository (Germany) and the Kochi Core Center (Japan).

The GCR also houses thin section, smear slide, and residue collections from these cores, as well as the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) Core Collection, and the Micropaleontological Reference Centers (MRC) collection. A satellite repository at Rutgers University houses cores drilled on land in New Jersey and Delaware that address similar scientific objectives to ODP Legs 150 and 174A.

The GCR staff is headed by Director Mitch Malone and Curator Michelle Penkrot and provides curatorial, scientific, publication, and outreach services. Access to several analytical laboratories is provided on a user-fee basis.

For more information, contact the GCR curator at gcr@iodp.tamu.edu.