Snow chemistry for exploration in Finland – a workflow for reliable results

Snow as an environmental memory is mostly known only in relation to substances from the air, such as dust or pollen in the ice sheets or glaciers. But earlier studies, among them from Russia and Canada, suggest that snow could also act as an environmental memory for gases from the ground (Taivalkoski et al. 2019). Hence, could snow even possibly be used as catchment media for signals from bedrock? This would require that elements as well as hydrocarbons are released from the bedrock, and migrated through the overlying transported cover, often glacial sediments, as ions or gases and are eventually captured by the snow. Of course, the expected element concentrations in snow are very low, especially for snow that exists for only one winter season. But snow as a sampling material would have the great advantage that the sampling and analytical methods have almost no impact on the environment.
In order to investigate whether snow could be used as an environmental memory in relation to the geological subsurface, and thus also for the detection of mineralization, snow was sampled within the framework of the EU project NEXT (New Exploration Technologies, Grant Agreement...) with regard to two questions: 1) Are the measured concentrations evaluable with regard to environmental properties, i.e., can they be measured reliably enough at all? and 2) does the element composition in the snow change significantly with changes in the bedrock lithologies, independent of soil properties?