Physical and geochemical data on a drill core from the semi-arid Coastal Cordillera, Chile

This dataset contains petrophysical, geochemical, and mineralogical data from a drilling core from the Coastal Cordillera, Chile. The drilling campaign in the semi-arid field site Reserve Santa Gracia was conducted in the framework of the “EarthShape” project (DFG SPP1803) to study deep weathering along a climate gradient. Previous studies in this area found that the weathering front is located much deeper than expected (Oeser et al., 2018). To explore the weathering profile and the depth of the weathering front, we performed various geochemical, petrophysical, and mineralogical analyses. The drilling campaign was conducted in March and April 2019, using the wireline drilling method with a standard industry truck-mounted PQ3-sized (85 mm core diameter, 123 mm hole diameter) rotary drilling rig (Sondajes Araos E.I.R.L.). A detailed description of the drilling activities is given in Krone et al. (2021). The retrieved core runs with a maximum length of 1.5 m were drilled using potable water, with added contamination control tracer for further microbiological analyses of the rock. As basis for our detailed study of deep weathering we determined the porosity, density, specific surface area, elemental composition, mineralogical composition, Fe oxidation, and the degree of weathering from chemical depletion, volumetric strain, and the weathering rate using the in situ cosmogenic nuclide beryllium-10 (10Be).