Denis G. Rancourt & Mei-Zhen Dang
American Mineralogist (2005) 90 (10): 1571–1586.
https://doi.org/10.2138/am.2005.1794
Abstract
Many natural surface-environment samples, such as soils and marine and lacustrine sediments, are complex mixtures involving several mineral phases (both petrogenic and authigenic), several amorphous and nanoparticulate inorganic phases (usually authigenic or pedogenic), and a heterogeneous amorphous component of “organic matter” (OM). The main inorganic amorphous and crystalline components are often operationally separated and quantified by various selective or sequential chemical extraction methods that are subject to various artifacts and that can be significantly affected by the presence of OM. Here we develop a general method of absolute quantification based on powder X-ray diffraction (pXRD) measurements that are obtained using standard