About ASC Scientific

Although ASC Scientific did not begin in a garage in Palo Alto, it was conceived in

a work cubicle at the Lockheed Ocean Laboratory in San Diego and opened in
1983 in a small office behind a donut shop in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.
The idea for ASC was born when a young paleomagnetist, Craig Amerigian, and a
young marine scientist, John Toth, were looking for new projects for their ocean
mining exploration group at the Lockheed. They saw a solicitation for a
paleomagnetic consulting contract and Craig said to John, “We can do that!”
They wrote a proposal during lunch breaks, and when it was funded they said
goodbye to Lockheed and opened their consulting company, Analytical Services
Company. This first work resulted in a series of contracts conducting
paleomagnetic studies at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington
for the Basalt Waste Isolation Project (BWIP) and the US Department of Energy.
The paleomagnetic studies were following by development of seafloor sampling
devices for marine minerals, funded through the US Small Business Innovative
Research (SBIR) Program.

Following this work, ASC was asked by the International Ocean Drilling Program
(IODP) to build hardware for a shipboard automated core analysis system. This
project helped established working relationships with instrument manufacturers
and fabrication facilities that led to future development of additional laboratory
instruments for paleomagnetic analysis and geological material processing.
About this same time ASC began working with some of the key manufacturers of
geology equipment and became a resale dealer, while also continuing their
development and fabrication of instruments. In 1988 a single-page
advertisement flyer was mailed to every college and university geology
department in the US and the resale business was born under the name ASC
Scientific. This was followed by a series of ASC catalogues created during the
late 1980’s and early 1990’s, which were mailed to geologists across the US.
Sales eventually moved online in the mid-1990’s to ascscientific.com.

As business expanded, ASC resale and business operations moved to a larger
facility and warehouse in Carlsbad, California and fabrication facilities moved to
the East Coast and eventually to our current facility near the University of Rhode
Island Bay Campus for marine studies in Narragansett. In 2018 all operations
were moved to the Narragansett RI facility, where our paleomagnetic and
geology equipment are build and our research tools for the earth sciences are
supplied to customers around the world.