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Preface
This book is intended to serve both as a textbook and as a professional reference. It is based on a course that I have taught for over 30 years at Cornell University to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. I was, however, never able to cover the entire contents in a single semester. That is even less possible with this expanded second edition. Rather, it is designed to allow the instructor to pick and choose chapters, and parts of chapters, to focus on particular aspects of geochemistry.
The second edition includes three new chapters that cover the critical zone, the oceans, and economic and environmental geochemistry. Additional material in Chapter 4 covers the thermodynamics of aqueous fluids at high temperatures, and there is expanded coverage of stable isotope clumping, mass independent fractionations, and nontraditional isotopes in Chapter 9. There have also been extensive revisions throughout to bring the book up to date with new developments over the last seven years. Not surprisingly, thermodynamics and kinetics have changed little, although I have added additional material to these chapters. There have been significant advances in isotope geochemistry, cosmochemistry, solid earth geochemistry, and organic geochemistry, and these chapters have been significantly revised. The new edition includes examples using MATLAB, THERMOCALC, and PHREEQC. Chapter 1 now includes an expanded overview of geochemistry to hopefully spark the interest of students at the beginning of the course. Each chapter now includes a summary of the most important points covered.
The ultimate basis of this book was my notes from geochemistry courses taught by my dissertation advisor, Jean-Guy Schilling. When I first began teaching geochemistry at Cornell, I pulled out those old notes as the starting point. I am grateful for the strong grounding he gave me in geochemistry, particularly in thermodynamic fundamentals. In the first few years, what was to become this book were merely outlined notes handed out to students, which slowly evolved into book form. Once the internet became available, I posted them online, mainly to save myself the trouble of copying and handing them out. Others began to access them as well. I am very grateful to my students over the years for pointing out errors and asking questions that I could not answer, which in turn forced me to research them and expand the book. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Cornell and around the world who have pointed out errors and critiqued the content. This expanded version has been produced in response to their comments and reviews.
One sad lesson I have learned about writing books is that you can never correct all the errors, no matter how many times you proofread. I apologize in advance for errors still present in the book.
July, 2019
Ithaca, New York
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Geochemistry is the chemistry of the natural environment and it encompasses the Earth as well as other Solar System bodies, what Antoine Lavoisier described as “the grand laboratory of nature.” As the etymology of the word implies, the field of geochemistry is somehow a marriage of the fields of chemistry and geology, or more broadly, earth science. But just how are chemistry and geology combined within geochemistry; what is the relationship between them? Perhaps the best explanation would be to state that in geochemistry, we use the tools of chemistry to understand the Earth and how it works. The Earth is part of a closely related family of heavenly bodies, our Solar System, that formed more or less simultaneously. To fully understand the Earth and how it became habitable, we need to understand that formation. Hence, the realm of geochemistry extends beyond the Earth to encompass the entire Solar System.
