Thin sections are wafer-thin slices of rock mounted on glass slides and viewed using petrographic microscopes. They are crucial for characterizing rock properties and are used across geoscience, engineering, and paleontology.

The UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences retains more than 100,000 thin sections—an incredibly valuable, irreplaceable resource collected over a century. These specimens have been underutilized because they were managed individually and not archived digitally.

ThinSLICE solves this by creating the largest publicly accessible digital thin section collection, making these specimens available forever—not just for UT researchers, but for everyone.