Geochemistry in mineral exploration / Геохимия в разведке полезных ископаемых

Geochemistry in Mineral Exploration is a pioneering text and reference book dealing with the newer phases of an ancient and important subject that has intrigued man ever since the days he began to use metals rather than stones for his weapons and implements.
In times of war the search for minerals has always accelerated. With new uses resulting from technological advances common by the beginning of World War II, the 15-year period of 1938-1953 saw a fantastic worldwide “boom” in the exploration for mineral resources. In this search more and more sophisticated geochemical methods of prospecting began to be employed throughout much of the western world. The Soviet geologists, however, had developed a massive state-directed, Eurasian continent-spanning mineral search almost a decade earlier, using at least primitive variants of such methods.
In 1939 Hewlett Johnson, the so-called “Red Dean” of Canterbury, wrote his controversial “The Socialist Sixth of the World.” In it he stated that the Soviet lands are “searched and scrutinized by geographers, geologists, mineralogists, chemists and engineers. Thousands of workers eagerly prospect for new sources of wealth, using all the resources of modern science, magnetometry, gravimetry, seismometry and radiometry. ...” Although at the time a doubting audience in the main considered Johnson’s writing essentially propagandistic, it turned out that, if anything, he had understated the situation. As early as 1932 Soviet geologists were engaging in some geochemical prospecting which they referred to as “metallometric” surveying. The growing volume of such surveying may be realized through a few statistics: the number of sites from which the Soviet geologists had collected samples totaled 31,656,000 by 1957. Since samples are now being collected at the rate of about 7 million a year, presently the Russian raw data units will total more than 50 million! Africa also is being sampled at the rate of about 1.5 million sites a year; North American geochemical samples may total 500,000 per annum. <...>