G20 



DATA OF GEOCHEMISTRY 



1 Sodium by difference only. 



C. 



E. 



Amethyst Lake near Jasper, Alberta. July 1952. Rawson (1953, p. 198). 

 Cree Lake, Saskatchewan. Dec. 1956. Analyst, E. C. Bailey. Rawson (1959, 



p. 18). 

 Slave River at Fort Smith, Northwest Territory, Nov. 1946. Analysis bv 



S. S. Copp, quoted in Moore (1949, p. 4). 

 Great Slave Lake, main lake, off Slave Delta, Northwest Territory. June 22, 



1946. Rawson (1950, p. 60). 

 Christie Bay, Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territory. July 5, 1946. Rawson 



(1950, p. 60). 

 Kam Lake, Yellowknife, Northwest Territory. Aug. 1947. Rawson (1950, p. 4) . 

 Mackenzie River at Fort Simpson, Northwest Territory. Aug. 1948. Rawson 



(1950, p. 4). 

 Mackenzie River about 3 miles upstream from separation, at Arctic Red River, 



Northwest Territory, Canada. July 24, 1958. Durum, Heidel, and Tison 



(1960). Analysis includes Mo, 0.000 ppm; Ni 0.036 ppm; P, 0.259 ppm; Pb, 



0.0029 ppm; Sr, 0.096 ppm; Ti, 0.0084 ppm; and Zn, 0.000 ppm. 



Waters of the Hudson Bay drainage (table 27) range 

 from rather dilute rivers flowing over well-watered parts 

 of the Canadian shield, with total dissolved solids of 

 about 50 ppm, to moderately concentrated rivers flow- 

 ing over the less well watered sedimentary rocks of the 

 wheatlands, such as the Assiniboine River with almost 

 700 ppm. Some additional analyses for Mackenzie and 

 Hudson Bay waters may be found in Eawson (1942, 

 1957). 



WEST GREENLAND 



In the general absence of information from the Arctic 

 parts of the North American continent, the analyses of 

 Bocher (1949) from West Greenland (table 28) have a 

 particular value. Although none of his water samples 

 are from the extreme north of Greenland where polar 

 desert conditions are most pronounced, they neverthe- 

 less show some interesting trends toward the evolution 

 of a desert water. The dilute lakes consist of a solution 

 of sodium and calcium bicarbonate, but in the more 

 concentrated ones calcium is almost absent, and there 

 is considerable enrichment of the other ions. It is quite 

 evident from the range of waters found in this pioneer- 

 ing study that much material has to be gathered before 

 a clear understanding of Arctic water chemistry is 

 gained. 



A word of caution is in order about the high silica 

 content of these waters. The samples had been 

 stored in glass of an unspecified kind for many months 

 before analysis, and it is quite possible that in Green- 

 land, as in Arctic Alaska, silica is much lower than 

 these figures imply. 



EURASIA 



The quality of the data from Europe and Asia is 

 very inconsistent. The major waters of Europe were 

 first analyzed almost a century ago, and since that 

 time very few complete analyses for major ions have 

 been made in western Europe. Almost the only 

 exception to this is Britain, where, largely owing to 

 the efforts of a single man, there exists a large amount 

 of modern analytical data for lake waters. For the 

 rest, it has not been possible to discover any sizable 

 quantity of complete recent analyses, and the data 

 that were included in the 1924 edition of this work, 

 were almost all accumulated by workers in the 19th 

 century. As these old analyses were made before the 

 need for multiple sampling was recognized, many of 

 them are spot analyses. Because they were made 

 before the development of accurate methods for many 

 of the minor constituents, their reliability is open to 

 some question. 



It is surprising that there should be no complete 

 modern analyses for waters in western Europe because 

 there has been a great deal of interest and activity 

 in water analysis during the last half century. Lim- 

 nologists in the Alps, in northern Germany, and in 

 Scandinavia have been extremely active, and have 

 compiled a tremendous amount of information about 

 the elements of biological importance. Some of these 

 studies have contributed greatly to our knowledge of 

 the hydrochemistry of minor elements, and we shall 

 refer to them in a later section of this work. There 

 has also been a great deal of strictly geochemical work 

 dealing with one or a small number of related elements 

 in a single river system, such as the work of Heide 

 and his co-workers (Heide, 1952; Heide and Kaeding, 

 1954; Heide, Lerz and Bohm, 1957; Heide and Moencke, 

 1956; Heide and Singer, 1954) on the Saale, and a large 

 amount of very important work on the geochemistry 

 of rain in Scandinavia, but there appears to have been 

 very little work on the general composition of lake 

 and river waters. A partial exception is provided 

 by the data of Ahnestrand and Lundh (1951) which are 

 deficient only in sodium, and Coin's very interesting 

 essay on the factors influencing water chemistry (Coin, 

 1946). 





