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Dredged rock material in the Collection dates from the early part of the 1900s. The Collection has slowly evolved from individual bags of rock to thousands of wooden storage boxes full of rock, housed on tall metal shelves.
Carl Hubbs and Roger Revelle provided rock materials from expeditions off Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s. During that same period, Francis Shepard dredged many regions along the California coast. Edwin Allison collected samples throughout the Pacific concentrating on foraminiferal studies during the 1960s. During the same decade, Albert Engel dredged and collected extensive volcanic and metamorphic rocks from throughout the Pacific as well as related continental material from Africa and North America.
In the 1960s and 70s William Menard surveyed and dredged seamounts, formulating early ideas about oceanic plate subsidence. Harmon Craig used dredge samples and samples from Pacific islands for his pioneer work on helium isotope systematics and their use as tracers of magma processes. Gustaf Arrhenius collected and studied manganese and other metal oxides/hydroxides from throughout the Pacific, creating a basic understanding of the geochemistry of sediments.
During the last few decades, E. L. Winterer, Rodey Batiza, Peter Lonsdale, Paterno Castillo, Sherman Bloomer, Robert L. Fisher, James Natland, Robert Stern, and James Hawkins have extensively dredged the East Pacific Rise, parts of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge and Indian Ocean ridge, as well as other plate boundaries such as the Tonga, Mariana, and Philippine Trenches, various fracture zones, seamounts and back arc basins. These expeditions have contributed many tons of basaltic and ultramafic rock to the collection.
Over the last decade the Dredge Rock Collection has been consolidated from various locations on campus into the Seaweed Canyon Geology Building.
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