Treatise on geochemistry. Part 1. Meteorites, comets and planets / Трактат по геохимии. Часть 1. Метеориты, кометы и планеты

Geochemistry has deep roots. Its beginnings can be traced back to antiquity, but many of the discoveries that are basic to the science were made between 1800 and 1910. The periodic table of elements was assembled, radioactivity was discovered, and the thermodynamics of heterogeneous systems was developed. The solar spectrum was used to determine the composition of the Sun. This information, together with chemical analyses of meteorites, provided an entry to a larger view of the universe.
During the hrst half of the twentieth century, a large number of scientists used a variety of methods to determine the major-element composition of the Earth’s crust, and the geochemistries of many of the minor elements were dehned by V. M. Goldschmidt and his associates using the then new technique of emission spectrography. V. I. Vernadsky founded biogeochemistry. The crystal structures of most minerals were determined by X-ray diffraction techniques. Isotope geochemistry was born, and age determinations based on radiometric techniques began to dehne the absolute geologic timescale. The intense scientihc efforts during World War II yielded new analytical tools and a group of people who trained a new generation of geochemists at a number of universities. But the held grew slowly. In the 1950s, a few journals were able to report all of the important developments in trace-element geochemistry, isotopic geochronometry <...>