Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0E8.
J Toxicol Environ Health A. 2010;73(2):242-52. doi: 10.1080/15287390903340906.
In environmental and human health protection, the role for geoscience may be expressed by how it enhances certainty in the hazard potential models that support risk assessment. For geochemical hazards, certainty reflects how well geoscience simplifies variability in the element concentrations and in the environmental conditions associated with exposure pathways. Through mineralogy, geoscience establishes natural geochemical background variability in terms of provenance, process, and past, and it links hazard potential to the physical and chemical transformation due to weathering and soil formation. The interpretation of hazard potential may be expressed by how analytical protocol, expressed by grain size and strength of acid decomposition, combines with geological factors, expressed by (1) mineralogy and mineral partitioning and (2) environmental cofactors, including moisture, pH, buffering capacity, and porosity. With this type of knowledge, geoscience enhances the potential to identify covariant relations between hazard indicators and disease, and to resolve potential causal factors.
在环境和人类健康保护方面，地球科学的作用可以通过它如何增强支持风险评估的危害潜在模型的确定性来体现。对于地球化学危害，确定性反映了地球科学在元素浓度和与暴露途径相关的环境条件的变异性方面简化的程度。通过矿物学，地球科学根据来源、过程和过去建立了自然地球化学背景变异性，并将危害潜力与由于风化和土壤形成而导致的物理和化学转化联系起来。危害潜力的解释可以通过分析方案（以粒度和酸分解强度表示）与地质因素（（1）矿物学和矿物分配和（2）包括湿度、pH 值、缓冲能力和孔隙度在内的环境伴随因子）的结合来表达。通过这种类型的知识，地球科学增强了识别危害指标与疾病之间共变关系以及解决潜在因果因素的能力。
