The new library, set to open early next year, has more than 20 years of storage capacity for new cores and cuttings.
While the state has been widely considered to have had the best core library in the Southern Hemisphere for decades, it is now full, hence the new facility. South Australia’s core library manager was consulted when Western Australia was designing its own, which is also considered one of the best in existence.
Offshore core and cuttings are now managed by the National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator and Geoscience Australia.
Last year all the offshore core from South Australia was shipped to Perth’s core store.
The WA Department of Mines and Petroleum is storing the offshore South Australian core as a service to NOPTA.
In South Australia, more than 900,000m of mineral drilling and 50,000m of petroleum drilling are completed annually by industry, with about 30,000m of the best representative mineral drill core samples retained as permanent reference material.
Under legislation, all petroleum cores and cuttings must be lodged at the core library and are available for public viewing and sampling after a two-year confidentiality period.
The new purpose-built facility will feature modern viewing rooms, access to geoscience information and related services, an industry workshop and education facilities and will be home to what its Department of State Development says is one of the world’s best ore deposits reference collections, a Data Metallogenica room and a palaeontology area to house the state’s fossil collection.
Core and chip samples are particularly useful for those areas of South Australia where potentially metalliferous basement rocks are covered by younger, less prospective sediments or where rock units of interest extend offshore.
The Glenside drill core storage facility was established in 1978 and has undergone extensions in 1982 and 2005. The most recent refit and renovation secures the facilities reputation as one of the most modern core storage facilities available to mineral and petroleum explorers.
The facility offers fully enclosed, modern viewing facilities with comfortable surroundings which are heated in winter and cooled in summer.
Material is also housed at Thebarton within the Adelaide metropolitan area.
Satellite core libraries have been established in the mid-north towns of Moonta and Whyalla, providing low level storage facilities for core and other samples obtained in mineral exploration programs on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas.
