Welcome to the UH Dredge Sample Archive Database!

DredgeBase is a vast library of material from across the Pacific Ocean seafloor from Japan and the Marianas in the west to the Galapagos in the east, from the Emperor Seamounts in the north to the East Pacific Rise in the south, with the Line Islands, Northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands, and the Musician Seamounts in the central portion. The collection consists of approximately 4,000 five-gallon buckets of rocks, plus an additional several thousand meters of drill cores in sections from sites on Midway Atoll, Oʻahu, and Hawaiʻi islands. Although dredged material makes up the bulk of the archive, many samples were targeted collections by human occupied submersibles and robotic vehicles. Chronology of sample acquisition ranges from the late 1960’s to the early 2000’s. All samples are humanly accessible from a series of shelves in a two-level rack unit. Contents of DredgeBase support the research goals of those individuals who initially collected the marine geological samples, and also those investigators from the community at large who choose to undertake new or continuing work by selecting from and utilizing the resources we preserve.

Each seafloor dredge sample is annotated with detailed ‘station’ data transcribed from the original dredge logs developed at sea, and carefully archived at the UH Marine Center Sand Island Facility. The National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), formerly NGDC, lists all of the UH dredge samples within its database. NCEI acts much like a clearing house for information and referrals and with their on line tools you can search the nations marine geological sample resources. Use the web map and archive list below to query for samples of interest to your work.

Please review our sample fulfillment policy under the Request Samples link below before generating a large request.