Londonderry Geoscience Centre officially renamed

l-r: John Clarke (great grandson of WB Clarke), Lindsay Gilligan and Alan Coutts.

The Londonderry drill core library has been formally renamed the W B Clarke Geoscience Centre in an on-site ceremony which included John Clarke, the great grandson of W B Clarke, ‘the Father of Australian Geology’.

The renaming in December this year, recognises the change of the facility from a drill core library, where over one million metres of drill core is housed, to a multifunctional centre.

Its immense collection of drill core is accessed by about forty exploration companies and contractors each month. However, since 2004, it has also served as the reference library for the DPI Mineral Resources’ fossil, mineral, and economic rock collections and houses the offices of the Specialist Geological Services group. The Centre is now also a venue for educational activities.

The core library is a world-class materials handling and storage facility and has been a valuable resource for the exploration industry for more than 40 years.

Drill core comes about from exploration drilling programs and provides a permanent sample of the rock strata intersected by drilling.

By storing the core permanently the rocks can always be made available to successive generations of explorers for further analysis, employing new technologies not presently available, increasing the chances of new discoveries to be made.

The WB Clarke Geoscience Centre now also houses the Economic Rocks and Mineral Collection which includes more than 24,000 specimens and the Palaeontology Collection comprising 44,000 macrofossils along with other geoscience reference collections

Both of these reference collections date back to the 1880s.

A sophisticated logging system will also be added to the Centre next year - a CSIRO-developed Hylogger spectral scanning drill core logging system supplied under an initiative of the Australian Government being conducted as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS).

The operation of this equipment will significantly add to the knowledge about geology and mineral deposits of New South Wales.

This outstanding facility is crucial to future mineral discoveries and mine developments in this State and complements the State’s EC Andrews drill core facility in Broken Hill, which holds more than 80,000 metres of drill core

The Centre is named in recognition of the father of Australian geology, the Reverend William Branwhite Clarke (1798-1878) who was directly linked with opening up the mineral wealth of NSW, particularly the discovery of gold.

He was a pioneering geologist and laid the foundations for the systematic work of the Geological Survey of NSW and his work was the basis for the first State geological map issued in 1880.

Private sector mineral exploration in the State is now at a record high with $144m being spent in 2006/07.