Geochemistry

Geochemistry is the science that uses the tools and principles of chemistry to explain the mechanisms behind major geological systems such as the Earth's crust and its oceans. The realm of geochemistry extends beyond the Earth, encompassing the entire Solar System and has made important contributions to the understanding of a number of processes including mantle convection, the formation of planets and the origins of granite and basalt.

History

The term geochemistry was first used by the Swiss-German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1838. In his paper, Schönbein predicted the birth of a new field of study, stating:

The field began to be realised a short time after Schönbein's work, but his term - 'geochemistry' - was initially used neither by geologists nor chemists and there was much debate over which of the two sciences should be the dominant partner. There was little collaboration between geologists and chemists and the field of geochemistry remained small and unrecognised. In the late 19th Century a Swiss man by the name of Victor Goldschmidt was born, who later became known as the father of geochemistry. His paper, Geochemische Verteilungsgesetze der Elemente, on the distribution of elements in nature has been referred to as the start of geochemistry. During the early 20th Century, a number of geochemists produced work that began to popularise the field, including Frank Wigglesworth Clarke who had begun to investigate the abundances of various elements within the Earth and how the quantities were related to atomic weight. The composition of meteorites and their differences to terrestrial rocks was being investigated as early as 1850 and in 1901, Oliver C. Farrington hypothesised although there were differences, that the relative abundances should still be the same. This was the beginnings of the field of cosmochemistry and has contributed much of what we know about the formation of the Earth and the Solar System.