History of the Database

The construction of the GEOROC database under the direction of Bärbel Sarbas began in January 1998 in the former Geochemistry Department of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz. Professor Albrecht Hofmann, then Director of the Geochemistry Department, took on six former employees of the Gmelin Institute (Frankfurt) that had just been discontinued by the Max Planck Society. GEOROC has been available online since the end of 1999. The database structure was developed in close cooperation with the group of PetDB, a petrological database of primarily ocean floor basalts started at a similar time at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, New York.

The content of the GEOROC database was initially limited to geochemical analyses of ocean island basalts, but was soon expanded to include samples of volcanic rocks from other tectonic environments and the mantle xenoliths they contain. All analyses of igneous rocks (plutonic and volcanic) published since 2017 are systematically included within the database. After Professor Hofmann retired, the GEOROC group joined the Biogeochemistry department, then the newly Climate Geochemistry department of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. However, due to the contractual situation of the former Gmelin employees their number has steadily decreased. The last member of the original GEOROC group, Bärbel Sarbas, retired at the beginning of 2022. In August 2021, the GEOROC database was formally transferred to the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. The new DIGIS group, including Bärbel Sarbas, is continuing to maintain and grow the database. In addition, DIGIS is modernizing the database infrastructure and expanding its international connectivity, which will be released under the brand of GEOROC 2.0 in 2024.