This year, Miros, Millie and Mike all visited the Continental Scientific Drilling Co-ordination Office/LacCore at the University of Minnesota. This was to attend one of the LacCore training courses delivered as part of the training and workforce development program, and gave BOSCORF staff an opportunity to exchange ideas and best practise with another core repository. LacCore is primarily a lake coring facility, offering a full service from project planning to delivery, and core analysis. The BOSCORF instrumentation is very similar to the LacCore laboratory, giving our staff an excellent opportunity to compare notes on instrument operations, and data quality management, in addition to diversifying th BOSCORF skill set to accomodate the growing number of lacustrine studies that are taking place in BOSCORF.
Miros attended a course specific to software designed for initial core description, core correlation and analysis. The CDCSO website has extensive links to available software, much of which is developed in house at Minnesota, and should be a prime resource for those wanting to splice lake core records together, or develop core correlations using visual tools. Key software includes corelyzer for correlation, PSICAT for digitizing core logs and Feldman for creating splice tables and composite depth scales. Full support is available online at https://csdco.umn.edu/resources/software.
Millie and Mike attended a course focussed on initial lake core descripiton and the lab based workflow for incoming cores using the range of geotek instruments available in both labs (MSCL-S, MSCL-XYZ and MSCL-CIS). In addition, some expoloration of the smear slide process, and an overview of recent developments to the excellent TMI website, for identifying features found in lacustrine smear slides. This website is an excellent resource, and smear slides remain underused in many core studies. If you are in BOSCORF, we are happy to train you on how to make a smear slide, and introduce you to identification. https://tmi.laccore.umn.edu/
