Surface soil-mercury surveys are an inexpensive and useful exploration tool for geothermal resources. ---- Surface geochemical surveys for mercury were conducted in 16 areas in 1979-1981 by ARCO Oil and Gas Company as part of its geothermal evaluation program. Three techniques used together have proved satisfactory in evaluating surface mercury data. These are contouring, histograms and cumulative frequency plots of the data. Contouring geochemical data and constructing histograms are standard evaluation techniques and offer a useful, visual summary of the data. Neither of these, however, allows the background andanomalous populations to be easily separated. Sinclair (1974, 1976) proposed the use of probability graphs to separate background and anomalies. Varekamp and Buseck ( 1983, 1984) incorporated some of these techniques in their discussions of mercury enrichment in various geothermal areas. The discussion below will deal primarily with applying probability techniques to surface mercury data. Probability graphs significantly help in separating mercury data into anomalous and background populations and provide a convenient way of analyzing complex data sets.
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