Canadian Database of Geochemical Surveys

Introduction

This website is the public interface to the "Canadian Database of Geochemical Surveys".  The database has two long-term goals.  Firstly, it aims to catalogue all of the regional geochemical surveys that have been carried out across Canada, beginning in the 1950s.  Secondly, it aims to make the raw data from those surveys available in a standardised format.  Over 1,600 surveys have been catalogued.  Approximately 500 are considered to be of long-term strategic value for mineral exploration and environmental baseline studies.  Work is progressing on standardising the data for these 500 surveys.  To date over 250 datasets have been converted.

This website provides high-level metadata for all of the catalogued surveys, and links to spreadsheets and KML maps for the standardised raw data.  Links to raw data in their original published format are included wherever possible.

Geochemical surveys frequently have complex histories of re-analysis and re-publication.  As a result, searching for a particular survey may be difficult.  In an effort to make searches more successful, the website presents the data from several different perspectives:

Index Map Query

A web mapping application, which displays the geographic extent of all of the catalogued surveys;

Periodic Table

Search for raw data according to the element of interest;

Index Tables

The contents of the database have been grouped into tables organised by category:

• Surveys
• Projects
• Publications

You can also use Internet search engines to search the site.  With Google, you can limit your search results to just this site by specifying "site:geochem.nrcan.gc.ca" as one of your search parameters.  For example, to search for surveys in Manitoba which involved Don Hornbrook, enter this search string in Google: site:geochem.nrcan.gc.ca hornbrook manitoba.

Database Summary (2024-08-29)