Geochemical signatures of gold: From the deposit to your hands
Gold, Geochemistry, Machine learning, Traceability, Chain of production
Gold production may be achieved through three main figures: artisanal mining, industrial mining, and illegal mining. Which could obtain it from a wide variety of ore deposits. Usually illegal mining comes with environmental, social, and economic problems that could scale from local to national. Therefore, it becomes imperative to ensure a responsible chain of production from the deposit to the consumers hands. Here a cutting-edge methodology is presented to trace gold from its original gold deposit and how it changes through the supply chain using traditional geochemistry (i.e., XRF, EPMA & LA-ICP-MS) combined with machine learning algorithms to discriminate, explore, and search for patterns in gold geochemistry to determine the possible source of a given sample. This technique can be applied on in-situ samples as well as analysis from the National Bank of Gold Profiles (BANPA). Although samples can be classified and discriminated among their peers on the same step of the supply chain a link between each step it still needed to secure the traceability of gold.