Discovering Minerals in Alberta’s Rocks
We maintain a large collection of mineral core and rock samples extracted from locations across Alberta at our Mineral Core Research Facility (MCRF) located in Edmonton, central Alberta. The archived core and rock samples are the product of government surveys and industry exploration activities, and are available to prospectors, mineral exploration companies, and academia for mineral exploration and research purposes.
More About Mineral Core and Rock Samples
The Mineral Core Research Facility stores more than 60 500 m of mineral core and more than 19 700 rock samples. Some interesting facts about this collection:
- approximately 33 000 m of core related to uranium exploration
- approximately 12 000 m of core related diamond exploration
- approximately 3000 m of core related to gold exploration
- over 18 000 rock samples from the Precambrian shield related to geological mapping
Learn more about core data at
Alberta Geological Survey’s Open Data Portal
Alberta Interactive Minerals Map
An inventory of the mineral core stored at the Mineral Core Research Facility is available on our Open Data Portal. Alternatively, the Alberta Interactive Minerals Map presents another online platform for exploring and visualizing the geospatial distribution of these borehole locations.
The mineral core inventory includes information about the core, such as
- stratigraphic units intersected,
- exploration commodity of interest,
- company responsible for drilling,
- associated mineral assessment report(s),
- core start and end depths, and
- geospatial coordinates.
Explore all the available data at
Inventory of Core at the Mineral Core Research Facility
Alberta Interactive Minerals Map
