The LILY Database: Linking Lithology to IODP Physical, Chemical, and Magnetic Properties Data

Abstract

During each expedition of the International Ocean Discovery Program and its precursor, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (jointly referred to as IODP), vast arrays of data are collected from drill cores. These data, which are accessible from the IODP LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) database, include physical, chemical, and magnetic properties collected semi-continuously along cores using automated track systems, as well as a variety of analyses conducted on discrete subsamples taken from the cores. In addition, the lithology of all cores is described based on visual characteristics of the surface of split cores, visual examination of smear slides and thin sections, and compositional or mineralogical information derived from geochemical analyses. We extract basic lithologic information from this complex array of descriptive information and then tie that information to all other measurements. This new database is referred to as LIMS with Lithology (LILY). LILY currently contains over 34 million data from 89 km of core recovered on 42 expeditions conducted 2009–2019. Some uses of LILY include identifying the abundance of different lithologies, finding data from core intervals with a specific lithology, assessing the efficacy of coring systems in different lithologies, or characterizing and analyzing physical, chemical, and magnetic properties based on lithology. We illustrate the use of LILY by computing the grain density by lithology from over 24,000 moisture and density measurements and then use those grain densities, along with the large IODP bulk density dataset, to compute a new high-resolution porosity dataset with over 3.7 million new porosity estimates.