The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Geochemical Database (NGDB) contains inorganic analyses for approximately 1.4 million samples of rocks, sediments, soils, plants, water, minerals, and other materials collected since the early 1960s. Additionally, the NGDB project has recovered and compiled data from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Uranium Resource Evaluation (NURE) Hydrogeochemical and Stream Sediment Reconnaissance (HSSR) Program conducted during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The NURE HSSR databases contain analyses from about 398,000 sediment/soil and 335,000 groundwater/surface-water samples. All data are being repackaged into searchable and downloadable datasets on the USGS Mineral Resources On-Line Spatial Data website (http://mrdata.usgs.gov).Although samples were collected to support geologic research and mineral exploration, the historical geochemical data and archived samples are increasingly being repurposed to identify hazards to the environment, to human and animal health, and to provide benchmarks for detecting temporal changes in the chemical environment.

USGS National Geochemical Database: Recovering, repackaging, and repurposing 50+ years of historical data

242nd National Meeting (2011)

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