The natural environment is under ever increasing pressure from the impacts of pollution. Quantifying these impacts is a necessary prerequisite for understanding, mitigation and regulation. Establishing the natural, or baseline, condition of environmental media is the first step in understanding the scale of pollutant impacts as it provides a datum against which changes imposed by pollutant inputs can be measured. The natural variation in chemistry of environmental media – water, sediment, soil – is large, and processes controlling the variation are complex.

BGS has a long history of research in establishing the baseline chemistry of diverse environmental media, particularly stream sediments, stream waters, groundwaters and soils. This research has been underpinned by the BGS laboratory facilities which provide high-quality analyses of geochemical and hydrogeochemical properties using a broad range of modern analytical techniques.

Selected research

• National Physical Properties & Processes Laboratories
• Inorganic geochemistry laboratory
• G-BASE
• Groundwater science
• Groundwater quality