The Earth’s geological history over the past 4 billion years has been deciphered through evidence held in physical material, including outcrop studies and drill cores. Svalbard offers a nearly continuous sedimentary record from the Devonian to the Neogene (Olaussen et al. 2025), representing a unique opportunity to understand how climate changed during the Phanerozoic. Hundreds of boreholes have been drilled in Svalbard over the past century, notably for coal, petroleum and scientific exploration (Fig. 1a; Senger et al. 2019). The challenge is that, unlike mainland Norway (overseen by the NGU) and the Norwegian continental shelf (managed by NOD), there is no single organization with the mandate and resources to safeguard drill cores and geological samples from Svalbard. As a consequence, many drill cores have been lost (Fig. 1b-d).

National institutions, typically geological surveys, oversee safeguarding and archiving geoscientific data in public archives, even after the demise of the company or institution initially acquiring it. Planavsky et al. (2020) emphasize the importance of long-term, safe storage of drill cores to facilitate scientific reproducibility and decipher the Earth’s deep-time climate archive. Their key message is that all samples used in geochemical analyses should be available for complementary analyses at well-funded and permanent drill core and sample repositories around the world. Drill cores are expensive to acquire, with a single deep borehole beyond the budget of most research projects. National geological repositories facilitate access to existing material. For instance, the UK’s National Geological Repository contains more than 600 km of drill cores that exceed 200 billion GBP in cumulative acquisition costs (Howe 2023). Geoscience Australia is a government agency that maintains a very large repository of geological data and physical samples, including drill cores (Geoscience Australia 2025). It aims to make more than 90% of its collections digitally accessible by 2035.

Providing access to this material to commercial companies and academics alike is crucial for maintaining scientific credibility (i.e., the possibility to reproduce results) and making sure material remains safely stored for commercial or academic re-use. In addition to storage, many repositories systematically characterize drill cores using non-destructive techniques such as a multi-sensor core logger and hyperspectral and x-ray fluorescence scanners (Shreeve 2023). Finally, Planavsky et al. (2020) argue that geoscientists, data curators, museum staff and journal editors need to work together to develop archival policies for such samples and drill cores.

This argument is equally valid for Svalbard, where many drill cores and outcrop samples have been acquired from inaccessible or strictly protected locations. For various reasons, there is no national institution taking care of drill cores from Svalbard. Many geoscientific data, including physical drill cores, have been lost because of the lack of such a caretaker.

In a bottom-up approach, UNIS, in collaboration with the Norwegian coal-mining company SNSK launched the SRV initiative in 2018. UNIS and SNSK organized a workshop for this initiative, held during 24–26 September 2018 in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The 33 participants, who represented 19 academic, industrial and government institutions (Table 1), were unanimously in favour of establishing a physical facility in or near Longyearbyen for storing and using existing and potential new drill core material. No consensus was reached on who should operate it or how it should be financed.

Following the workshop, a three-year networking project (SRV2020) was undertaken, also jointly led by UNIS and SNSK. The focus was on (1) safeguarding Svalbard’s geological heritage (e.g., drill cores) during the turbulence of the rapid downscaling of coal mining and (2) facilitating geoscientific co-operation in Svalbard by allowing better access to physical geoscientific material and data. In parallel, lobbying efforts were made at local and national levels for the establishment of a core storage facility. A scientific drilling proposal with global relevance under the umbrella of the ICDP was developed. Called SvalCLIME, it would be an important contributor to the proposed repository in the future (Senger, Kulhanek et al. 2023; Kulhanek et al. 2024).

The aims of this contribution are to (1) outline the motivation and background of the SRV project, (2) synthesize current knowledge about physical subsurface materials from Svalbard, and (3) present a vision for an improved core storage repository near Longyearbyen.

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago covering all islands in the area of 74–81°N and 15–35°E. Access to Svalbard’s natural resources is regulated by the Svalbard Mining Code (Bergverksordningen), which was ratified in 1925 along with the Svalbard Treaty. The Svalbard Treaty grants Norway full and absolute sovereignty over the archipelago but also specifies that all signatory countries have equal access to its resources. Consequently, Svalbard is very international and past exploration for coal, petroleum and minerals has involved companies from many countries (Elvevold 2015; Senger et al. 2019).

The location of mineable coal seams historically determined where permanent settlements were established in Svalbard (Senger, Ammerlaan et al. 2025). Coal mining has facilitated year-round industrial activity for the past century. Svalbard was often examined as the window to Barents Sea geology by generations of petroleum geoscientists (e.g., Nøttvedt et al. 1993; Olaussen et al. 2025). Norway’s exploration for hydrocarbons in Svalbard began in the early 1960s (Fig. 1a; Senger et al. 2019). More recently, research drilling has been conducted with diverse scientific targets, including complete characterization of a clinoform sequence at Sysselmannbreen (Johannessen et al. 2011), CO₂ storage potential near Longyearbyen (Braathen et al. 2012) and investigation of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction and its aftermath at Deltadalen (Zuchuat et al. 2020). UNIS was established in 1993 and conducts year-round field teaching in Svalbard, including geology. Drill cores are an integral part of education and research at UNIS.

Over the decades, various groups have gathered geoscientific data from Svalbard, but accessing geological data from past expeditions is often challenging and incomplete. This is particularly evident when considering physical drill cores, many of which have been lost because of mismanagement or the harsh Arctic conditions (Fig. 1b-d).

Drill cores have obvious commercial value, but in Svalbard, where most land is already claimed or protected as national parks or nature reserves (Fig. 1a), there is currently no commercial interest except for the declining coal exploitation industry. Nonetheless, drill cores are crucial for addressing issues of societal relevance, including CO₂ sequestration (Braathen et al. 2012), natural gas characterization (Ohm et al. 2019) and assessing the geothermal potential (Senger, Nuus et al. 2023). Furthermore, drill cores are fundamentally important for deciphering deep-time palaeoclimatic events, including the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (Dypvik et al. 2011), Cretaceous cooling/warming events (Jelby et al. 2020; Vickers et al. 2023), and the largest mass extinction at the end of the Permian (Zuchuat et al. 2020).

Svalbox is a UNIS-led integrated database that includes digital outcrop models and photospheres in the context of Svalbard’s regional geology (Senger, Betlem, Birchall et al. 2021; Betlem et al. 2023; Horota et al. 2024). In the context of the SRV project, Svalbox serves as the integration tool spanning scales (from outcrop to borehole to regional geophysics) and disciplines (geology, geophysics, remote sensing). Svalbox was developed as a teaching tool at UNIS to extend the field season (Senger, Betlem, Grundvåg et al. 2021) but has untapped potential to act as an integrated geodatabase for the SRV initiative, particularly for digitizing and connecting the various archives.

Hundreds of boreholes have been drilled in Svalbard, the vast majority for coal exploration and exploitation. Coal boreholes are geographically clustered around the main settlements (Longyearbyen, Barentsburg, Ny-Ålesund, Sveagruva, Grumant, Colesbukta and Pyramiden) and are stratigraphically restricted to coal-bearing Paleogene, Cretaceous and Carboniferous strata. Research and petroleum exploration wells cover significantly larger geographic and stratigraphic areas (Senger et al. 2019). Table 1 lists the known availability of material from various boreholes.

For the Longyearbyen CO₂ Lab project, data are summarized and openly shared in a recent data article (Senger, Betlem et al. 2025). For other projects, including petroleum exploration, data are much more fragmentary and hard to access. A summary of the technical material available from three main archives—the NPN archive at UNIS, the Polarinvest-Barentz-gruppen archive in Tromsø and the Tromsøbreen II archive in Lund—is provided by Senger et al. (2022). Polarinvest-Barentz-gruppen was a holding company that owned all or part of several Norwegian companies that sought to locate and extract natural resources in Svalbard (Lindbach 2001). These companies were dissolved in the early 1990s. There are other relevant archives, including the private collection of Svein Ytreland, housed by the Svalbard Museum (Fig. 3b).

Data from the 18 petroleum exploration boreholes are, unfortunately, fragmentary and their quality varies according to the operator and time of drilling (Table 1; Senger et al. 2019). A summary of known reports is provided by Senger et al. (2022) and in Table 2.

The availability of physical drill cores makes possible spin-off research projects. For example, the Sysselmannbreen drill core, along with associated wireline logs and other measurements and information, was used not only to characterize the clinoform succession it was targeting (Johannessen et al. 2011) but also provided important constraints in regional sedimentary architecture (Grundvåg et al. 2014) and the geochemical signal across this important time period (Doerner et al. 2020).

SNSK’s drilling campaigns contributed to several geoscientific research projects utilizing the drill cores, including studies of palaeogeography, basin development and general tectonic regime in Svalbard during the Palaeogene (Steel et al. 1981; Nøttvedt 1985; Lüthje et al. 2020), the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (Charles et al. 2011; Dypvik et al. 2011; Nagy et al. 2013), palaeoclimate (Schlegel et al. 2013), geochemistry and petrology of the coal deposits and their implications for burial history models and petroleum potential (Marshall, Large et al. 2015; Marshall, Uguna et al. 2015; Uguna et al. 2017), carbon storage potential from peat based on coal studies (Marshall, Large et al. 2015) and constraints on the break-up of the North Atlantic using ash layers in the cores (Jones et al. 2016; Jones et al. 2017).

Sedimentary logs from several boreholes in Petuniabukta have been published by Verba (2013) and subsequently included in a regional tectono-stratigraphic study by Smyrak-Sikora et al. (2021). Similarly, Piepjohn & Dallmann (2014) present stratigraphic information from Russian boreholes in Mimerdalen from Russian reports in a publication on the stratigraphic subdivision of the area.

The Longyearbyen CO₂ Lab project is a prime example of how open data can stimulate spin-off research projects. While the project did not result in the injection of CO₂ into the subsurface, for economic and political reasons, eight boreholes were drilled and fully cored, and a lot of complementary data (wireline logs, outcrop studies, geophysics etc.) were acquired. Senger, Betlem et al. (2025) summarize this open data package, including all related publications: 123 peer-reviewed publications, of which 55% are related to spin-off research projects like deep-time palaeoclimate and geothermal exploration.

For the benefit of the international geoscientific community, there is a strong need to establish a modern drill core storage and core analysis facility in or near Longyearbyen by the next International Polar Year. Such a facility would be immediately relevant to research in Svalbard, particularly as the activity in the coal industry declines and the Norwegian government is promoting other activities to maintain a robust settlement in Svalbard. This situation makes it pressing to either maintain and upgrade the Endalen storage facility or to establish a new one. Moreoever, incorporating new technologies into the repository, such as digital outcrops and digital core models, and properly archiving existing geoscientific material would reduce our environmental footprint by minimizing the need for new drilling, which is financially and environmentally costly. The management and organizational structure of the facility should be clarified by the end of 2026.