Geochemical background - what a complex meaning has such a simple expression!

Abstract

The term background was introduced in geochemistry applied to the prospecting of mineral deposits to designate a value, below which the samples would represent normal contents and above which they would be deviations from normality and could represent anomalies related to mineral deposits. In the 1980’s, when the techniques applied in mineral exploration were absorbed by the nascent environmental sciences, the term background was also incorporated with a very similar meaning. However, since its first application, this term has been adopted arbitrarily, without considering the enormous diversity of underlying variables that can substantially alter its numerical meaning. In this article, the large number of components that make up this "complex system" known as geochemical background will be presented and discussed, and which cover virtually all concepts of geochemical exploration whether applied in geological-mining or environmental actions, such as: the type of sample collected, the sample preparation procedures, the fraction to be analyzed, the analytical technique used, the criterion for choosing the value, the sample density, the spatial variability and the variations over time.

Determining the lithogeochemical background concentrations of 39 elements in Bavarian rocks

“…Medians and 90th percentiles of element concentrations are considered as robust parameters for geochemical distributions (Licht 2020). However, the scope of this study is limited to a regional scale; this is due to a small number of samples (i.e.…”

Integrated Geochemical Assessment of Soils and Stream Sediments to Evaluate Source-Sink Relationships and Background Variations in the Parauapebas River Basin, Eastern Amazon

“…In general, soils have a strong correlation to the parent geological material. In contrast, stream sediment samples have a wider representativeness, restricted to the whole upstream catchment area of the sampling point, and high susceptibility, not only due to the different lithologies occurring in the catchment area, but also due to changes in the hydrosedimentological dynamics, influenced by local seasonal variations, and changes in land cover and land use [15,16].…”