The British Geological Survey (BGS) published on Friday an online database of freely viewable and downloadable marine geoscience data.

The data, covering the whole British Continental Shelf, are available through the Offshore GeoIndex service on BGS's official website.

It holds approximately 80,000 sampling locations that have a range of valuable geochemical, geological, geotechnical and sediment data including PDF files of legacy scanned data sheets and borehole logs.

"We want this data to benefit the whole geoscience community by aiding research and inspiring new spin-out products," said Bob Gatliff, BGS Director of Energy & Marine Geoscience.

"The marine environment is an ever increasingly important area of scientific study as it is worth more than 48.6 billion pounds to the UK economy, which is predicted to double by 2030. At 3.5 times the UK land mass, it is an area with vast economic and environmental potential," Gatliff added.

BGS operate the British National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) and are also the Marine Environment Data and Information Network (MEDIN) Data Archive Centre (DAC) for Geology and Geophysics.

Offshore data like these are important for research into areas such as carbon storage, energy resources, planning, habitat mapping and conservation.