Reliability of geochemical analyses: Deja vu all over again

Abstract

Today the vast majority of commercial laboratories are accredited. Quality control (QC) results are documented and, upon request, available to the customer. That has led many customers of analytical services to neglect the need for their own, laboratory independent, external QC for large geochemical mapping or monitoring projects. Here, based on recent examples from projects of the Geological Survey of Norway, it is demonstrated how such an external QC procedure should look. Simple graphics are used to visualize QC results. R scripts for producing these graphics are provided. Despite of the laboratories' own internal QC procedures, a number of quality issues like time trends, sample mix-ups, concentration breaks between different batches due to the use of several instruments and excessive rounding of analytical results were detected. Thus, even in these times of accreditation, it is still a necessity to install project-level, laboratory independent, QC procedures in order to produce reliable and comparable datasets.

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