Quantitative diatom analyses—a faster cleaning procedure

Laboratory techniques employed for cleaning marine sediments for quantitative diatom analyses are time consuming and expensive. In an attempt to reduce preparation time, the method in use in our laboratory, has been compared to six other different methods, which derive from Barronʹs procedure for rapid sample preparation at sea. on the statistical analyses of the results all the methods in which centrifugation was used, were eliminated. From the two methods that did not show differences from the control method, the cleaner and better preservation of the diatom specimens observed in the slides produced by method M2 lead us to elect this procedure as the best. This method distinguishes itself from other techniques in using of a non-dried sample dispersed before the chemical attack.