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Introduction

¹ Geological Survey of Norway, Trondheim, Norway
² US Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado, USA

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

This special issue of Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis (GEEA) presents a collection of papers in honour of Dr Arthur G. Darnley for his contributions to international- and global-scale geochemical mapping. Eion Cameron (2007) has provided an eloquent tribute to Arthur, and we will not attempt to repeat the biographical information given there. It is Arthur's accomplishments over the last 18 years of his life that we recognize with this publication and which we will briefly summarize.

Those last almost two decades saw Arthur, from his office at the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, take on the leadership of a team of geochemists representing about 100 countries interested in establishing standards for geochemical mapping at national and continental scales and in producing a global-scale geochemical database according to those standards. Although several countries had conducted national-scale geochemical mapping projects, it was virtually impossible to merge the data sets and the resulting geochemical maps because of the wide variety of sampling and analytical protocols used. In 1988, the International Geological Correlation Program (IGCP) established Project 259 ‘International Geochemical Mapping’ under Arthur's leadership. The objectives of this project were to conduct a comprehensive review of methods being used at that time for small-scale (i.e. large geographic area) geochemical mapping studies and to develop recommendations for producing a global-scale geochemical database. The findings and recommendations were published in 1995 (Darnley et al. 1995) in a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publication that has come to be known fondly in the geochemical mapping . . . [Full Text of this Article]