AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- The Chevron Corp. announced Wednesday it is donating $1.5 million to a U.S. university to preserve a treasure trove of historic geological cores.
Chevron officials say the geological cores and cuttings are being entrusted to the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin.
The donation, comprising 1,500 tons of material collected during 60 years of drilling in 120 nations, enhances the largest publicly available collection of geological cores and cuttings in the world and makes the material available to public researchers.
"The willingness and the generosity of companies like Chevron to make the data public, to associate that with cash contributions, is a huge contribution to future generations," said Bureau Director Scott Tinker. "It's making something permanent that would otherwise be lost and in this country would never be collected again."
Rock cylinders called cores and ground up bits of rock called cuttings are collected during oil and gas exploration. To geologists, they reveal Earth's ancient history and are critical tools in determining the location of fossil fuels, the record of Earth's climate and biology and the history of geohazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
