Active Climate, Earth & Environment Economics & Business

British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility (BOSCORF)

Funder NERC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation NOC (Up to 31.10.2019)
Funding £3.0M
Period Sept 2018 — Sept 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility (BOSCORF) now stores 8.8 kilometres of sediment cores—a 20% increase in holdings occurred in 2014 alone, representing £295 million of NERC investment in ship time. These cores are the physical archive of past climate, ocean chemistry, and geological events, extracted from the seafloor. Without a central facility to log, store, and distribute them, the UK would lose access to irreplaceable records of how the Earth system has behaved over millennia. The facility’s user base has more than doubled since 2014, and the number of PhD students supported has tripled, now including archaeologists, geographers, and biomedical researchers alongside marine geologists. If BOSCORF continues to operate and expand, it will underpin research that improves climate models, informs sea-level rise projections, and helps assess risks to coastal infrastructure and energy grids. The cores also provide baseline data for understanding ocean acidification and carbon cycling—processes that directly affect fisheries and marine ecosystems. This is fundamental science with a long track record of feeding into practical decisions about flood defences, shipping routes, and offshore energy development.

View original technical description
The British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility (BOSCORF) is a unique and internationally-recognised facility providing the UK community with some of the best core logging facilities available in Europe. It provides research facilities used in all NERC Theme Science Priority Areas and contributes directly to NERC Directed and Core Programmes and high-profile international projects. Its state-of-the-art facilities underpin crucial UK research in all areas encompassed by the NERC mission. BOSCORF was founded as a NERC facility in 1997 and the core repository was extended in 2001, this extension was envisaged as providing storage for the next ten years of core acquisition (i.e. to 2011). Since 2001, BOSCORF's core holdings have increased very significantly with 2014 alone seeing a 20% increase in core material held. In 2018, the total volume of sediment cores held within BOSCORF is 8.8 km, which equates to £295 million investment by NERC in ship time for their collection. Since 2014, the number of users per year has more than doubled and the number of Ph.D. students supported by the facility has increased threefold. Recent years have also seen a marked widening of the BOSCORF user base to include archaeologists, geographers and biomedical researchers in addition to marine geologists. This demonstrates the importance of BOSCORF facilities in a wide range of research areas.

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Researchers

Douglas Connelly (Principal Investigator)Natalie Campbell (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

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Field Spectroscopy Facility (FSF)
National Capability - Polar Expertise Supporting UK Research
UK contribution to the international Bio-Argo Network.
National Environmental Isotope Facility (NEIF)
UKCRIC - Bristol Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction Facility (SoFSI)

Original classification

Research Grant

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