Geochemical fingerprinting: 40 years of analytical development and real world applications

Geochemical fingerprinting is a rapidly expanding discipline in the earth and environmental sciences. It is anchored in the recognition that geological processes leave behind chemical and isotopic patterns in the rock record. Many of these patterns, informally referred to as geochemical fingerprints, differ only in fine detail from each other. For this reason, the approach of fingerprinting requires analytical data of very high precision and accuracy.