WGA, 2005 - Geology and Energy Resources of the Powder River; 28th Annual Field Conference Guidebook, 1976

299
Twenty-Eighth Annual Field Conference- 1976 Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook

REGIONAL GEOCHEMICAL BASELINES IN SOILS OF THE POWDER RIVER BASIN, MONTANA-WYOMING

RONALD R. T I D B A L L AND R I C H A R D J. E B E N S 1

G E O C H E M I C A L BASE L I N E - - A

REFERENCE

The advent of a large coal-based, electric-generating industry in the western United States has focused attention on the need for "geochemical baselines" with which to measure or monitor future changes in the geochemical environment. In our experience, the term "geochemical baseline" is rarely defined in a quantitative way. Hypothetically, a geochemical baseline may be thought of as a collection of data points each defined as the natural value of a given geochemical measurement in a given sample that one would expect in the absence of man-induced alterations. From this viewpoint, of course, the baseline is never known with certainty unless the chemical property of interest can be measured before any alterations occur. This is the ideal circumstance. If the changes in the environment have already begun, however, those changes must be measured against a baseline established from samples collected from outside the area of suspected change. In general, baselines tend to be established from data collected on materials as similar as possible to the affected materials that are taken from areas as close as possible to the affected area. Extrapolation of geochemical data from one area to another for use as a baseline raises an interesting question: How far (geographically) can a geochemical property be extrapolated? Our work in the Powder River Basin suggests that individual geochemical measurements on soil samples cannot be extrapolated very far, but that a summary property of a group of samples may be extrapolated over large distances depending on the magnitude of the larger scaled features of variation in the study. Numerous summary properties may be used, each being suitable for some specific use, but we propose a novel and statistically rigorous definition that we feel should be useful for assessment of geochemical pollution. Consider the hypothetical case illustrated in figure 1. Assmne that the concentration of some element in soil has been examined in detail along two traverses, one with a regional component of variation absent lfigure 1A) and one with a regional component present (figure 1Bi. In both traverses, the concentration changes rapidly from one point to a nearby point Ilarge local variation) indicating that extrapolation of individual measurements is risky except over very short distances. This geochemical situation, in fact, seems to be a common one for most soils. 1U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colo. 80225.

The general inability to extrapolate individual measurements in soil samples over more than short distances demonstrates the need for some geochemical measurement which can be extrapolated and, at least for figure 1A, a reasonable range of concentrations seems to be just such a m e a s u r e m e n t . T h i s r a n g e in c o n c e n t r a t i o n m a y be estimated by use of the average and the standard deviation of the observed concentrations. Various definitions of the range depend on the limits that are prescribed. About two-thirds (68.3 per cent) of a suite of randomly selected samples is expected to fall within a range defined as the average i 1 standard deviation. About 95.4 per cent is expected to fall within a range

A.
z O ~" , , z
w C9 z 0 U

Baseline

DISTANCE

B.
z 0
~-Z W Z 0 C9

as eli ne

IBaseline

DISTANCE
Figure 1. Illustration of hypothetical element distributions along traverses where the regional variation is either absent (A) or present (B). Baseline is shown as the range of local variation.