Senger_Filling_The_Rock_Vault.pdf

Svalbard offers an insight into the sedimentary record of paleo-climate change from the Snowball Earth conditions around 650 million years ago through Late Paleozoic tropical and sub-tropical climates, Mesozoic climate fluctuations, Paleogene warming and Quaternary to Holocene glaciations. Vegetation-free outcrops provide excellent opportunities for relatively cheap sampling, as evidenced for instance by the renowned Festningen section in western Spitsbergen. High-resolution mm-to-cm scale sampling and non-destructive analyses are, however, only viable when fully-cored boreholes are available. The Deltadalen research boreholes were drilled in 2014 specifically to constrain the paleoclimatic evolution across the end-Permian mass extinction and provide an excellent role model for targeted future research campaigns to penetrate other geological intervals of interest. The helicopter-based operation was conducted with minimal environmental impact, and two ca. 100 m deep boreholes were drilled and fully cored within one week. In addition to the Deltadalen boreholes, significant material borehole material already exists in Svalbard. The Longyearbyen CO₂ lab boreholes penetrate most of the Mesozoic section near Longyearbyen (ca. 4.5 km of cores), including the Upper Jurassic ‘black’ shales and the Lower Cretaceous succession recording climate fluctuations of global extent. Store Norske’s coal exploration boreholes cover the Lower Cretaceous and Paleogene (ca. 60 km of cores) and were used to infer high-resolution environmental shifts and age constraints across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Finally, a research borehole was drilled and fully cored (1.1 km) through the Paleogene at Sysselmannbreen in 2008. Many more relevant boreholes were drilled, for instance for petroleum and coal exploration, but unfortunately many have been lost due to lack of a central core storage repository.

The Svalbard Rock Vault initiative aims to safeguard existing material and facilitate its scientific usage. The idea is not only to make existing core material more accessible, but also to provide facilities to conduct non-destructive high-resolution analyses on the drill cores in Longyearbyen (MSCL, XRF, digital photography and FAIR data archiving). Large numbers of samples have been collected by scientists from universities and research institutions. Many of these collections are “tied” to the project responsible and will be lost if the person changes job or retires. Such sample and thin section collections will also be included in the Svalbard Rock Vault. Our ambition is that the Svalbard Rock Vault will not only take care of existing data, but also facilitate the collection of more research drilling across key intervals in the future. In this context, we review the deep-time paleoclimatic studies conducted on Svalbard outcrops and boreholes, and summarize what material is presently available. We also solicit contributions from the international community interested in utilizing Svalbard’s geological record for paleoclimatic studies, in anticipating of forming an international continental drilling consortium in the near future.