Effects of exponentially decaying spatial patterns on the probability distribution of anomalous values

Abstract

The nature of geochemical anomalies is discussed on a speculative basis. Anomalies are classified as independent or as additive, depending on their spatial relation to the background population. The additive anomalies, which are more commonly encountered in geochemical exploration, cannot be separated from the background, in a composite population, by extracting straight lines from curved cumulative frequency graphs, because the cumulative frequency of the distribution of the additive component of an anomaly plots as a curved line on normal and lognormal probability paper.