Advances in Forensic Geochemistry

Advances in Forensic Geochemistry

Elhoucine Essefi
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8386-9.ch001
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Abstract

This chapter is meant to give the state of the art of forensic geochemistry and recent advances. In terms of forensic organic geochemistry, detecting mature organic matter including polluting hydrocarbons follows an experimental procedure by using recent experimental analytical techniques. However, the interpretation of these results needs an understanding of the geochemical context to make a distinction between the natural and the human made origin of oil. Infrared data coupled with statistical analyses would have an important relevance for the detection of the pollution during the Anthropocene, which is marked an increasing human pollution reaching the level of environmental crimes. In terms of nuclear and isotopic forensic geochemistry, recent studies provided that nuclear forensics considers the fact that some measurable parameters or signatures are distinctive.
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2. Forensic Organic Geochemistry

Biomarkers are one of the most important hydrocarbon classes in petroleum (Malmborg et al., 2020). They are one of the most resistant groups of hydrocarbons to degradation in the environment (Thienpont et al., 2021). Using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) we can detect biomarkers in small quantities (ppm and sub ppm) in the presence of a wide variety of other petroleum hydrocarbon types. Biomarkers are one of the most degradation resistant groups of hydrocarbons in the environment. They have formed under a variety of conditions and geological ages resulting in several biomarker fingerprints. Chemical analysis of biomarkers gives very important information to environmental legal investigations from the point of view of determining the source of spilled oil, differentiating and correlating oils and monitoring the degradation process and eroding condition of oils under a wide variety of conditions. Biomarkers have for many years been widely used in petroleum exploration and reservoir geochemistry to obtain information of value to geochemists such as the thermal maturity of the oil, the type of source material, the depositional environment of the source rock, the approximate geological age of the source rock and the degree of biodegradation of the oil (Zhou et al., 2021). This chapter provided a brief overview and discussion of biomarker chemistry, biomarker characterization and quantification, biomarker distributions, eroding effects on biomarker composition.

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