Maintained by: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The WDC for Geophysics and Marine Geology, Boulder is operated by, and collocated with, the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC).

Summary of Data Held: WDC for GMG, Boulder manages all types of data from the ocean floor including descriptions and analyses of seafloor samples, deep drilling data, underway geophysical measurements, and derived gridded data sets including total sediment thickness of the world oceans. Other data types include coastlines and plate boundaries.
Geophysical data include bathymetry, gravity, and magnetics, and single-channel and multi-channel sub-bottom profiles collected on more than 4,000 oceanographic surveys covering millions of km from the world's oceans. Bathymetric data include i) underway bathymetric measurements (including multibeam data); ii) gridded bathymetric data for the world's oceans based on compilations by the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office and; iii) hydrographic sounding in U.S. waters. WDC for GMG also offers gridded total sediment thickness data from ocean basins and sidescan sonar image data.
Geologic data are available for over one hundred thousand cores, grabs, dredges, and drill samples covering most of the world's oceans. Data include i) faunal counts; ii) geochemical measurements such as carbon and isotope data, trace metal analyses of sediment, and major-element analyses of rocks; iii) physical properties of sediment, including particle size and geotechnical properties such as vane shear and density; iv) visual descriptions; v) paleomagnetics; vi) downhole logging data and; vii) marine minerals data.
Data are contributed by sources from around the world and were originally collected for a variety of purposes, including academic research, international and interdisciplinary scientific projects, commercial mineral resource evaluations, defense, and government environmental baseline studies.

User Services: The WDC for GMG is located in the David Skaggs Building at 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado. Visitors are welcome during normal working hours; advance notice is recommended. A visiting scientist program exists. Data processing, copying and analysis facilities are available. Data are available on most media including CD-ROM, via Internet, and other media on request. On-line access via Worldwide Web (URL address above), Gopher (gopher.ngdc.noaa.gov) and anonymous FTP ( ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov). Login for FTP access is userid: anonymous, and password: your full e-mail address. WDC for GMG inventories are fully searchable via the WWW and many CD-ROM and other databases are available for on-line searching and data download.

Publications: WDC for GMG publication series color images, data reports, and scientific reports of interest to the MGG community.

Special Projects: WDC for GMG participates in the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) technical committee on International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE), the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), regional IOC mapping projects, and cooperates extensively with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), for which it operates a parallel data archive.