Drill core

More than 3 million metres of drill core

Drill core collection

The Mineral Resources Information Office in Malå hosts SGU's national drill core collection witch close to 4 million meters of drill cores from more than 22 000 boreholes from all over Sweden. The collection is one of the largest in the world.

Many of the drill cores have associated drilling and core logs, results from geophysical borehole measurements, chemical analyses, and more. Scanning of this material is in progress. Besides this documentation on the existing drill cores there are logs for about 8,000 boreholes that no longer exist.

New drill cores are regularly added to the collection and most of them are available to the public.

Core logging and sampling

Next to the collection there are three rooms for core logging and sampling. The room should be booked well in advance. Visitors may borrow a key to the drill core collection to gain access to the premises around the clock and at weekends. Visitors can also access office space.

The Mineral Resources Information Office can provide facilities for logging and sawing drill cores and storage. At the cost of SEK 1000/day, including bringing out material, anyone at all can make an appointment and examine drill cores from SGU's own material.

Visitors can also take new test samples of drill cores in the collection if a sufficient portion of the core remains. A copy of the analysis results is to be submitted to the Mineral Resources Information Office within six months. After these six months, the material becomes publicly available. Since the cost for analysis was previously very high, most of the drill cores have been sparingly analyzed.

The “Drill cores” map viewer

SGU has a large collection of drill cores. The “Drill cores” map viewer shows where the drill cores were taken and whether they are stored in the collections in Malå or in Uppsala.

The “Drill cores” map viewer (new window)

Read more about SGU's different collections

In SGU's collections you will find different kinds of geological samples that have been collected since SGU was founded in 1858. The material comes from the many surveys that SGU has done and is therefore a reflection of the agency's activities.

To SGU Collections (in swedish)

Last reviewed 2025-01-08