In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, BOEM funded offshore surveys in 2015 and 2016 to identify new sources of sand in federal waters from Miami, Florida, to Massachusetts. Geophysical surveys, followed by the collection of geological core samples, were conducted and analyzed. More detailed geophysical and geological surveys took place at specific offshore mid-Atlantic locations in 2016 and 2017 to determine potential volumes and the extent of new sand resources. The overall initiative is known as the Atlantic Sand Assessment Project, or ASAP.
The data is being shared through Lamont’s System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR) at http://www.geosamples.org/. Users may type in “set name/igsn” and “BOEM” to search the collection. Ultimately, the full set of ASAP metadata will be accessible through Lamont’s main database, the Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMGLS) housed in the National Center of Environmental Information.
After the contractor analyzed all the ASAP core samples to characterize sediment grain size and composition, and catalog the source locations in data files, approximately 200 core samples from offshore the 11 states were shipped to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute. Working with Lamont’s Core Repository, BOEM is storing archived halves of the vibracores and making the cores, and associated data, available to researchers addressing such topics as climate change and sea level rise over the millennia.
