SVALBARD ROCK VAULT: From vision towards reality: a pilot project for 2019-2020

The Svalbard Rockvault project is an initiative to archive and protect unique geological material acquired on Svalbard primarily through drilling activity, but also by geological sampling and geophysical acquisition campaigns. National institutions around the globe are in charge of safeguarding and archiving geoscientific data and material in public archives, even after the demise of the company or institution initially acquiring it. In Norway the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) runs and maintains a national core storage centre at Løkken and the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) maintains an extensive core storage facility from offshore wells as well as the world-unique DISKOS database of geophysical data. With NGU and NPD solely focusing on continental and offshore Norway, respectively, Svalbard falls well beyond any existing framework for the storage and archiving of geoscientific data and samples. Complicating matters even more, local and international companies have equal rights to explore for natural resources on Svalbard as a result of the Svalbard Treaty, resulting in a large exodus of geological material away from Svalbard. In order to bring Svalbard on par with the rest of Norway and the world, as well as to keep an overview of the whereabouts of past, present and future data, we propose the Svalbard Rock Vault initiative. As part of the Svalbard Rock Vault initiative we aim to 1) bring (historically) relevant institutions together and to assess and inventorise their Svalbard-related collections , 2) discuss the challenges of and possible solutions to the (geoscientific) data exodus from Svalbard, 3) start on cataloguing and openly sharing some of the unique data sets from Svalbard.