Marine measurements are unique in time. Many data are not in a digital form or available for use by the wider general scientific community. Locating (archaeology) and digitizing (rescue) historical marine data that exist in manuscript or electronic media form that are at risk of loss due to media decay can save significant resources and can make available large amounts of data for temporal trend assessments such as those required to determine changes in oceanographic climate.

This web page aims to provide further information on some of the data archeology and rescue projects that are ongoing within the UK and internationally. Please contact enquiries@oceannet.org if you would like to provide further information or experiences of data archeology and rescue that you have been involved in. In particular we are interested in digitization issues and experiences and funding mechanisms.

GODAR (Global Oceanographic Data Archeology and Rescue) is an ongoing project which operates under IOCs International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange. To date this project has resulted in a doubling of ocean profile data for the pre-1991 period which has predominantly been entered to the World Ocean Database - see Figure below. This in turn has provided further data for oceanographic temporal trend assessments, encouraged the construction of global and regional oceanographic atlases, and improved quality control procedures for oceanographic data. The report of a Regional GODAR Workshop for Member States of
Eastern and Northern Europe can be downloaded here and a technical report giving ahistory of GODAR and recent achievments can be accessed here.