Exploration geochemistry continues to be a major contributor to mineral exploration programs at all scales. The decade has spanned a complete economic cycle in the minerals industry, during which there has been a change in exploration emphasis from the dominance of Au and diamonds to the addition of a range of base metals and the recent revival of U exploration. Increasing metal prices and the ...

Geochemical analyses of stratigraphic sequences of lava flows are necessary to understand how a volcano works. Typically one sample from each lava flow is collected and studied with the assumption that this sample is representative of the flow composition. This assumption may not be valid. The thickness of flows ranges from <1 to >100 m. Geochemical heterogeneity in thin flows may be created by...

A fundamental challenge in modern mantle geochemistry is to link geochemical data with geological and geophysical observations. Most of the early geochemical models involved a layered mantle and the concept of geochemical reservoirs. Indeed, the two layer mantle model has been implicit in almost all geochemical literature and the provenance of oceanic island basalt (OIB) and mid-ocean ridge bas...

Discrimination of the blind and dispersed mineralization deposits is a challenging problem in geochemical exploration. The frequency domain (FD) of the surface geochemical data can solve this important issue. This new exploratory information can be achieved using the interpretation of FD of geochemical data, which is impossible in spatial domain. In this research work, FD of the surface geochem...

The surface geochemical response to bedrock containing elevated levels of the platinum group elements (PGE) is commonly so subtle that standard geochemical methods are insufficiently sensitive to assist the exploration geologist. At the Geological Survey of Canada, recent research on analytical methods by one of us (GEMH) has been directed toward the development of a selective leach of soils an...