Core description is the process of documenting the cylindrical rock samples, called "cores," that result from scientific drilling. As the cores come out of the ground, they are examined and described by a team of scientists (sedimentologists) who specialize in identifying and interpreting the "stories" in the rock. The end product of this process is a series of diagrams that graphically represent the core description. These diagrams are crucial as they are the primary record of what was recovered during drilling and provide the scaffolding upon which all further scientific analysis is built.
Traditionally, the core description diagrams are created first by sketching them in a field notebook, then having some poor soul—usually a graduate student—draft them up in a graphics application such as CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator. This creates nice, publication-quality diagrams, but sufferes from two major faults:
- There is a large amount of duplicated effort because each diagram is drawn twice—once by hand, then again in digital form.
- The final product is a collection of static images that cannot be easily manipulated, analyzed, or searched. Answering questions such as "what percentage of the sediment was sand?" requires visually reviewing each diagram and manually recording the features of interest.
This was the case with ANDRILL (www.andrill .org), a drilling project in the Antarctic on which I am the IT manager.
After mulling over the problem of improving the current core description process, I came to the conclusion that the data encoded in the diagram was the key. The sedimentologists were drawing diagrams that visually represented some data (depth, grain size, rock type, and the like) without ever capturing that data itself. It's akin to drawing a bar chart without keeping the data being charted. Is the data lost? Not really; it's just not in a format that can be used to calculate a mean or standard deviation. Being able to access this core description data directly, instead of through its graphical representation, would let the scientists search for features of interest and perform further analyses more easily.
