Dear Taiwo,

it depends on what you want compare your rocks with.

In classical igneous petrology studies, a comparison is between the investigated rock and the hypothetical composition of Earth's mantle, best represented by CI (chondrite type Ivuna) meteorites. I use the King et al. (2020 Article Terrestrial modification of the Ivuna meteorite and a reasse...

Cheers,

Michele

indeed for magmatic rocks in general we use the normalization with respect to chondrite:

you can use them

Sun and McDonough (1989) & bokuma 1994.

Hi Taiwo:

There are different types of normalization, one is comparing your rock with a known standard to determine more easily how your sample differ from the standard as explained earlier by Michele Lustrino. But there is a different type of normalization which is useful when you do exploration with a portable XRF machine, if that´s the case you can do the following:

First add all the elements values of the first sample of your XRF analysis, but careful as all the elements need to be in (or need to be converted to) the same units and let´s call that “Sum1”. Then decide the new sum you want to convert all your samples to and let´s call it Sum2, usually Sum2 it is chosen to be a 100% value but, be advice that portable XRF do not analyze all the elements in particular they don´t analyze Na, C, Li, B, N, and any element that has a lower atomic number than sodium. The multiplying factor will be: Sum2/sum1 (sum2 divided by sum1) but usually 100/sum1.

Then, all your samples need to be multiplied the multiplying factor that you will need to calculate for each sample as sum1 will typically differ on all of your samples. That way you will have all your data normalized to a 100% (or the number that you chose to normalize with).

This is useful when you want to compare different analysis captured directly on the field that can have more open spaces or a more compacted soil, that will affect the totals of your analysis. There are examples where you can have REE enrichment in the B horizon of soil profiles some of which could be of economic value.

Hope this helps, best regards,

Haroldo.