The search for saline water springs started in the area of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania several hundreds of years ago. First drillings to find coals seams were reported from the end of the 18th century. Mining for brown coal lasted from 1817 until 1960. Three mines produced between 1900 and 1926 potash and rock salt. First oil exploration wells were drilled in the 1920/30s without success. Numerous deep wells drilled between 1950 and 1990 reaching depths up to 8,009 m and about 3,600 seismic lines enabled the detection of several oil deposits. The huge amount of subsurface data allowed to find geothermal resources in the 1980s and is still the base for new scientific investigations and to develop projects of underground uses.
The archive of the Geological Survey of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania comprises lithology data from 700 deep wells. More than 2,250 well logs exist, most of them are SP and GR logs. 70,000 m of cores from 400 wells document rocks from different eras beginning with the Mesoproterozoic basement of Baltica, covering the Caledonian deformed Ordovician on Rügen and the Devonian to Carboniferous strata of the Variscan foreland as well as the volcanics and sediments filling the North German Basin since the Permian. More than 11,000 rock samples and c. 26,000 thin sections used for petrographic descriptions are preserved. Countless analogue data gained from petrophysical and geochemical analyses still have to be digitized to fulfill the requirements of the Geological Data Act (GeolDG), especially for making geological data available for the public.