THE UTAH CORE RESEARCH CENTER: UTAH'S LARGEST PUBLICLY AVAILABLE COLLECTION OF GEOLOGICAL SPECIMENS, WELL CORE AND DATA FOR THESIS WORK, ACADEMIC RESEARCH, WORKSHOPS, AND CLASSROOM STUDIES

The Utah Core Research Center (UCRC) offers students, educators, and other researchers access to Utah's most comprehensive collection of geological specimens for thesis and academic research, workshops, and classroom studies. UCRC holdings include subsurface samples from more than 3600 wells, core from more than 800 wells, samples from major tar sand and oil shale deposits, and type oils from all the producing formations in the state. The UCRC collection also contains representative samples from Utah's coal mines, metallic mineral deposits, industrial rocks and minerals, geothermal wells, sediment and brine from Great Salt Lake, and surface stratigraphic sections.

The UCRC is fortunate to have high-quality stratigraphic research core collections ideally suited for workshop and classroom studies. Highlights include the remarkably detailed fluvial-dominated deltaic sands of the Cretaceous Ferron Sandstone of east-central Utah, shallow-shelf carbonates of the Pennsylvanian Paradox Formation of southeastern Utah, eolian sandstones of the Jurassic Navajo and Nugget formations of northern and central Utah, and complete core intervals through the Tertiary Green River Formation in the Uinta Basin of eastern Utah. The UCRC collection is ideally suited to supply data for projects including (1) facies, diagenetic, source-rock and biomarker studies, (2) oil and gas reservoir characterization, (3) metallic mineral investigations, and (4) coal resource evaluations.

The UCRC has upgraded and replaced scientific equipment to provide technical support for research activities using the geologic collection. Analytical data, geophysical logs, and reports by donors may also be available. Destructive testing is allowed with restrictions and advanced permission. The UCRC is organized to quickly adapt to a variety of client needs such as workshops, classrooms, large-scale sampling, digital imaging, and other research programs.