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Single Onshore Borehole Index

Publisher
British Geological Survey (BGS)
Updated
13 August 2026
Topic
Not set
Licence
Not set

Summary

The Single Onshore Borehole Index (SOBI) is an index of over 1 million boreholes, shafts and wells and references collections of digital and analogue records from all forms of drilling and site investigation work held by the BGS. The index covers onshore and near shore boreholes from Great Britain dating back to at least 1790 and ranging from one to several thousand metres deep. Some 50,000 new boreholes are added each year. The majority of the records contain written descriptions of the ground encountered. The SOBI index database originated in 1988 from a number of existing tables and from data input from a variety of coding forms. Therefore not all fields in the database are populated and data that should be in some fields may currently form part of the entries in another. The index is available on the BGS website via the Geoindex

Data links

Link Format Preview Updated
UK Geothermal Platform 13/8/2026
UK Geothermal Platform Web Map 13/8/2026
Single Onshore Borehole Index XML 13/8/2026
Single Onshore Borehole Index KML 13/8/2026
GeoIndex Onshore: Borehole records 13/8/2026

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Additional information

Source Metadata
XML, HTML
Date added
13 August 2026
Harvest GUID
9df8df52-d7c7-37a8-e044-0003ba9b0d98
Extent (Latitude)
60.8600° to 49.7700°
Extent (Longitude)
-8.6500° to 1.7800°
Dataset reference date (creation)
1988
Frequency of update
continual
Access constraints
The copyright of materials derived from the British Geological Survey's work is vested in the Natural Environment Research Council [NERC]. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the prior permission of the copyright holder, via the BGS Intellectual Property Rights Manager. Use by customers of information provided by the BGS, is at the customer's own risk. In view of the disparate sources of information at BGS's disposal, including such material donated to BGS, that BGS accepts in good faith as being accurate, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) gives no warranty, expressed or implied, as to the quality or accuracy of the information supplied, or to the information's suitability for any use. NERC/BGS accepts no liability whatever in respect of loss, damage, injury or other occurence however caused.
Responsible party
British Geological Survey (distributor, pointOfContact, custodian)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng