An Introduction to Forensic Geoscience E-Book

Elisa Bergslien

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 940

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

An Introduction to Forensic Geoscience provides fundamental training in geoscience as developed through the lens of its forensic applications. It incorporates a range of topics including geophysical methods of grave detection, the mineralogy of art, identification of microfossils, and comparison of soil trace evidence samples. Each topic is introduced using core concepts that are developed with increasing complexity in order to give readers an understanding of the underlying scientific principles involved and a taste of the wide range of possible forensic uses. A variety of detailed reference tables have been compiled for the text and each chapter contains lists of references to applicable textbooks and journal articles. Examples of real criminal cases are also presented in each chapter to make the connections between theory and real world application. The goal of this book is to give readers a familiarity with the wide range of ways in which geoscience principles and geological materials can be utilized forensically.

Additional resources for this book can be found at: http://www.wiley.com/go/bergslien/forensicgeoscience.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Companion Website

Title page

Copyright page

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

Figures

List of Color Plates

List of Cases

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 A Brief History of Forensic Science and Crime Scene Basics

Scene of the Crime

Processing the Crime Scene

Types of Evidence

Chapter 2 Minerals: The Basic Building Blocks of Geology

Mineralogical Fraud

Minerals

Types of Bonding

Mineral Groups

Properties of Minerals

Summary

Chapter 3 Rocks: Storybooks of the Earth

The Rock Cycle

Properties of Rocks

Igneous Rocks

Sedimentary Rocks

Metamorphic Rocks

Summary

Chapter 4 Maps: Getting a Sense of Place

Global Location Systems

Maps in the United Kingdom

The Global Positioning System

Maps

Remote Sensing and Other Resources

Summary

Chapter 5 Sand: To See the World in a Grain of Sand

An Introduction to Sand

Characterizing Sand

Surface Features

Sample Collection

Sample Preparation

The Stereomicroscope

Forensic Examination of Sand

Common Minerals

Less Common Minerals

Opaque Minerals

Anthropogenic Materials

Summary

Chapter 6 Gems and Gemstones: Those Most Precious of all Minerals

An Introduction to Gemstones

Crystal Forms

The Petrographic Microscope

Light and the Optical Properties of Minerals

The Forensic Identification of Glass

More Optical Properties

Isotropic versus Anisotropic Minerals

Anisotropic Crystals

Other Important Properties of Gems and Gemstones

Identifying Gems and Gemstones

Organic Gemstones

Summary

Chapter 7 Soil: Getting the Dirt on Crime

Introduction to Soils

Soil Horizons

Soil Origins

Phyllosilicates (Sheet Silicates)

Some Important Clay Minerals

Soil Classification

Soil Color

Soil Moisture

Particle Size

Sample Collection

Simplified Manual Dry Sieve Method for Particle Size Analysis

Soil Classification Schemes

Soil Survey Maps

USDA Textural Classification

The ASTM Unified Soil Classification System (USCS): D-2487

Scene Examination

Visual Examination of Soil Evidence

Examination Procedures for Soil Samples

An Introduction to X-ray Diffraction Spectrometry (XRD)

Interpreting a Diffraction Pattern

Summary

Chapter 8 The Geology of Art

Geologic Media and Art Forgery

Mineral Pigments

Black Pigments

White Pigments

Earth Colors: Red, Yellow, Orange, and Brown Pigments

Blue Pigments

Green Pigments

Collecting a Sample for Microscopic Examination (McCrone, 1982)

Raman Spectroscopy

Chromatography

Inks

Summary

Chapter 9 Fossils and Microfossils: Traces of Life

Geologic Time and Index Fossils

An Introduction to Fossils

A Brief Introduction to the Classification of Fossils

Invertebrate Paleontology

Micropaleontology

Collection and Treatment

Scanning Electron Microscope

Is It Legal to Take This Fossil?

Rare-earth Elements

Summary

Chapter 10 Geology and People: Forensic Anthropology and Forensic Archeology

Locating Ground Disturbances

Search

Geophysical Tools

Magnetometry

Electrical Resistivity (ER)

Electromagnetic Induction (EMI)

Specialized EMI: Metal Detectors

Ground-penetrating Radar (GPR)

Search and Post-search Operations

Elemental and Mineralogical Analysis of Human Bone

Summary

Chapter 11 Environmental Forensics: Tracking Pollution to Its Source

Water: Our Most Precious Natural Resource

Surface Water

Clean Water Act

CERCLA and SARA

Groundwater

Contaminant Hydrogeology

Safe Drinking Water Act

Water-quality Measurements

Field Water-quality Measurements

Water Contamination

Analytical Techniques for Chemical Fingerprinting

Isotopes in the Environment

Summary

Index

Color Plates

Companion Website

This book has a companion website:

www.wiley.com/go/bergslien/forensicgeoscience

with Figures and Tables from the book

This edition first published 2012 © 2012 Elisa Bergslien

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bergslien, Elisa.

 An introduction to forensic geoscience / Elisa Bergslien. – 2nd ed.

p. cm.

 Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-22795-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6054-4 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-444-39832-8 (epdf) – ISBN 978-1-444-39833-5 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-444-39834-2 (mobi)

 1. Forensic geology. 2. Environmental forensics. I. Title.

 QE38.5.B47 2012

 363.25–dc23

2012002695

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

List of Color Plates

Plate 2.3 Periodic table of the elements.

Plate 2.21 Examples of mineral luster, from left to right: metallic luster (two pieces of galena and one cube of pyrite), resinous luster (middle rear copal, middle front orpiment), and vitreous (two pieces of quartz).

Plate 2.22 Examples of the range of possible colors of the mineral fluorite.

Plate 2.23 Some common crystal habits: (a) acicular, (b) bladed, (c) cubic, (d) dodecahedral, (e) octahedral, (f) tabular, (g) dendritic, (h) fibrous, (i) globular, (j) rosette.

Plate 3.7 Common igneous rocks: (a) gabbro, (b) basalt, (c) diorite, (d) andesite, (e) granite, (f) rhyolite.

Plate 3.9 Examples of common sedimentary rocks: clastic rock (a) conglomerate, (b) arkose, (c) quartz sandstone, (d) shale; chemical sedimentary rock, (e) chert; biological sedimentary rock, (f) coquina.

Plate 3.11 (a) Well-sorted sand versus (b) poorly sorted sand versus (c) an extremely poorly sorted till.

Plate 3.15 Chemical sedimentary rocks: (a) limestone, (b) travertine limestone, (c) chert, (d) oolitic limestone.

Plate 3.16 Biological sedimentary rocks: (a) fossiliferous limestone, (b) coquina, (c) coal, (d) two different examples of amber.

Plate 3.19 Foliated metamorphic textures: slaty, phyllitic, schistose, gneissic.

Plate 4.9 USGS topographic map. Portion of the Corfu, NY NW4 Attica 15′ Quadrangle 1950 edition.

Source: Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey.

Plate 4.11 Example of a geologic map from a section of the Geologic Map of the Eagle Quadrangle, Eagle County, Colorado by David J. Lidke, 2002.

Source: Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey.

Plate 4.15 Symbols used on topographic maps produced by the USGS. Variations will be found on older maps.

Source: Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey.

Plate 4.16 Simplified key for Geologic Map of the Eagle Quadrangle, Eagle County, Colorado by David J. Lidke, 2002.

Source: Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey.

Plate 4.17 Landsat image of the Great Lakes Region of North America ID:LE70170302010125EDC00, taken 5.5.2010.

Source: Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey’s Global Visualization Viewer.

Plate 5.7 Photograph of rounded, sub-rounded, sub-angular, and angular sand grains.

Plate 5.11 Images of different types of sediments. The black bar in each image represents 1 mm: (a) river sand, (b) inner shelf sand, (c) beach sand, (d) beach gravel, (e) river gravel with cobbles, (f) beach gravel and cobbles.

Source: Buscombe, Rubin and Warrwick, 2010. Courtesy of the United States Geological Survey.

Plate 5.14 Examples of some of the wide variety of distinctive sand types from around the world: (a) White Sands, New Mexico desert sand composed of small soft grains of gypsum; (b) Texas City, Texas beach sand composed of coarse rock fragments and shell pieces with almost no fines; (c) Smith Island, Baja California, Mexico, beach sand composed of shiny metamorphic rock fragments with some organic material; (d) Oak Creek, Nevada desert sand composed of sub-angular grains of quartz with some feldspar; (e) Indiana Dunes, Indiana, dune sand composed of pitted, frosted, rounded quartz grains that will make a squeaking sound when shaken; (f) Half Moon Cay, Bahamas, white oolitic beach sand with small, rounded grains of pink coral; (g) Big Island, Hawaii, green beach sand formed predominantly of olivine with some obsidian and shell fragments; (h) Oahu, Hawaii, black basalt beach sand; (i) Fort Pierce, Florida, mature beach sand composed almost solely of clear, well-polished quartz grains; (j) Antelope Island, Great Salt Lake, Utah, oolitic lake sand; (k) Lake Bratan, Bali, Indonesia, lake sand from a lake that fills a volcanic crater; (l) Vanua Levu, Fiji, carbonate beach sand composed almost entirely of shells, sea urchin spines, and other organics; (m) Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Utah, frosted dune sand; (n) Pismo Beach, California, beach sand; (o) Third Beach, Vancouver, Canada, beach sand; (p) Hoshizuna-no-hama, Iriomote, Okinawa, Japan, star sand; (q) Kalalau, Kauai Island, Hawaii, beach sand; (r) Perissa, Santorini, Greece, black volcanic sand.

Source: Photograph m. and n. by Mark A. Wilson; o. by Bobanny; p. by Geomr; q. by Psammophile; r. by Stan Zurek.

Plate 7.13 A very small example of some of the common soil colors.

Plate 7.15 (b) Soil sample divided into sieve fractions and pan fraction (top right), along with some prepared sample slides.

Source: Photograph courtesy of William Schneck.

Plate 8.3 Pigments for sale on a market stall, Goa, India. Photograph by Dan Brady.

Source: Used courtesy of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Plate 9.3 Original hard part materials.

Plate 9.4 Fossil from Glass Mountain in Texas, so named because the original material of many of the fossils has been replaced with silica. The fossils are extracted from the limestone by acid dissolution. The resulting silicifed specimens retain incredible detail and much fragile structure that would normally have been lost.

Plate 9.5 Pyritized fossil ammonite.

Source: Photograph by Randolph Femmer courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) office.

Plate 9.23 Brachiopoda, class Articulata, order Terebratulida. Recent brachiopod from the Philippines, displaying the distinctive shape that causes them to be called lamp shells.

Plate 9.34d Mollusca, Ammonoidea.

Plate 9.37 Echinodermata, Crinoidea. A variety of examples of fossil crinoid pieces.

Plate 9.42d Graptolite fossil Pendeograptus fruticosus: two overlapping, three-stiped rhabdosomes.

Source: Photograph by Mark A. Wilson.

Plate 9.45 Foraminifera (s) planktonic Globigerina in the Northern Gulf of Mexico.

Plate 9.52 Ostracoda (a) A living ostracod, genus Spelaeoecia that is only from marine caves and occurs in Bermuda, the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, and Yucatan, Mexico.

List of Cases

Note on cases: Several examples of real cases have been included throughout the text to help illustrate the potential forensic uses of geological materials. Some of the case titles in the text are followed by a citation, indicating a published authority that serves as the principal source of information for that case. Other cases are listed without an initial citation. These have been reconstructed by this author from a variety of primary and secondary source materials such as court transcripts, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, books and other publically available resources. These reconstructions are the best the author can provide, given the information available, and the author apologizes for any mistakes or mischaracterizations that have inadvertently been included in this text.

Chapter 2

The Great Diamond Hoax

Mineral Fraud Now: The Story of Bre-X

Chapter 3

The Cindy Rogers/Cheryl Renee Wright Case (Rapp, 1987)

A Volcanic Crime

A Question of Source (Ruffell and McKinley, 2008)

Another Case of a Rocky Substitution (Murray and Tedrow, 1992)

The Lady in the Lake: A case of justice delivered or justice denied?

An Investigation of Bosnian War Crimes (Brown, 2006)

Chapter 4

The Importance of Local Knowledge

Where Am I? Where Are You?

Where Were You the Night of … ?

Geology with Intent to Harm (Murray, 2004; Murray and Tedrow, 1992)

Chapter 5

The Sands of War

The Murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro (Lombardi, 1999)

Beach Sand: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Another Geologic Substitution (Murray, 2004)

Sand from the Bottom of a Shoe (Petraco, Kubic, and Petraco, 2008)

Chapter 6

The Thailand Gemstone/Jewelry Scam

Conflict Diamonds

Scams, Cons, and Thievery

The Millennium Sapphire

The Importance of Knowing Your Gems

Jaded

Jurassic Park Problems

Chapter 7

A Dirty Deed

Use of Soil Evidence in a Heartbreaking Crime

Rare Minerals Linked to Crime

Using the Mineralogy of Crime

Chapter 8

A Brief Examination of the Vinland Map

The L’Infante (Brainerd, 1988)

Better than the Real Thing

Chapter 9

Use of Fossils to Help with a Question of Where …

Kidnapping and Diatoms

Diatoms and Drowning

Place of Death

Stolen Dinosaurs

Chapter 10

Pigs in the Ground and an Application of ER

Helpful Negative Results

Here? Really?

What is in That Urn?

Chapter 11

Firing the Public Imagination

Mom, This Water Tastes Funny

The San Mateo Mystery Spill

Ötzi the Iceman

Seeking Justice for Adam

Preface

The popularity of television shows such as CSI and Cold Case, not to mention all the cable documentary shows, created a recognizable increase in student interest in the sciences. Inspired by this increased interest in science and with the cooperation of the long-standing Forensic Chemistry program at Buffalo State College, which started in the 1970s, I developed a problem-based learning, forensic geoscience course that was offered for the first time in the spring of 2005. Based on my work in contaminant hydrogeology, I already had an appreciation for forensic geoscience from the civil law side and was very interested in becoming more conversant with criminal law applications as well.

In the United States, most forensic workers have strong backgrounds in chemistry and/or biology, but little or no training in the earth sciences. There are relatively few practicing forensic geoscientists in the United States and the discipline is currently outside the mainstream perception of forensic science. Indeed, it is not even mentioned in the National Academy of Sciences’ 2009 report. My course was designed to give the students destined for careers in forensic laboratories a crash course in the basic principles of geology and a hands-on introduction to the many ways that geological materials could be forensically useful.

One of the major obstacles I encountered was a lack of materials to support such a course. The classic text Forensic Geology by Raymond C. Murray and John C. F. Tedrow was no longer readily available, Ray Murray’s wonderful follow-up, Evidence from the Earth, is geared more toward laypeople, and most current forensic texts concentrate on forensic chemistry and the intricacies of DNA. As a result, I ended up writing a laboratory manual/textbook of my own for use in the class. I begged, borrowed, and bought literally dozens of books that addressed specialized topics, like pigment analysis, and procured hundreds of articles in an attempt to synthesize reference materials describing the disparate ways in which geoscience can be applied forensically. I also had the blessing of an immeasurable quantity of help and support from a variety of experts in the field.

At the time, I did not have much thought beyond giving my students the materials they needed to be successful. Then, at the 2006 Geological Society of America’s annual meeting, I presented some of the materials I had developed and got a strongly favorable response. Afterward, I was flooded with requests for background case information, suggestions on how to develop forensic exercises, and, most commonly, pointers to materials. Eventually, several people told me that I should make my materials into a book, because there was nothing else like it available. I set about transforming the course materials I had developed into a textbook that is meant to be a detailed introductory exploration of those areas of geology most likely to be of use to a forensic science student. I sincerely hope that this book fulfills the wishes of the many colleagues who have offered support and that it provides both a useful introductory text for undergraduate courses on forensic geoscience and a practical basic reference for the forensic science community.

In the intervening time since I started my course and the completion of this book, there have been other forensic geoscience books published, all of which make significant contributions to the field. However, they generally assume that the reader already has some level of background knowledge or are compilations of papers. This book takes a completely different tack: it was written with the assumption that the reader does not necessarily have anything other than a general background understanding of the natural sciences.

Each geoscience topic is introduced from basic concepts, which are developed with increasing complexity, in order to give a taste of the wide range of possible forensic applications. The chapters contain lists of further reading to appropriate textbooks and journal articles that readers can use as starting points for more detailed study of the geoscience topics presented. A variety of reference tables have been compiled for the text so that this book can serve as a basic reference in a laboratory setting. Applicable case studies are also presented in each chapter, many of which have references to additional information, others of which were developed from primary sources. The goal of this book is to give readers a familiarity with the amazing range of ways in which geosciences principles and geological materials can be used forensically, thus the subject matter presented typically goes into more depth than would a traditional introductory geology textbook. However, it is very important to note that this text is by no means an exhaustive study.

Companion Website: Many of the chapters have additional information available on the companion website at www.wiley.com/go/bergslien/forensicgeoscience.

Cautionary Note: This book is an introductory textbook that focuses on providing training information for students. It does not presume to dictate forensic laboratory methodology or prescribe definitive protocols or definitions. Any procedures described were developed primarily for use by students and may not reflect the actual procedures employed by a particular forensic laboratory. This book will hopefully serve as a useful starting point for geologists, attorneys, members of law enforcement agencies, forensic scientists, and, of course, students, but as the myriad disciplines that fall under the general heading of geoscience testify, there are a wide range of possible approaches to questions and a number of different analytical methods that can be used in any given situation. The materials here are meant to help individuals understand what geological materials may potentially prove useful, and help place forensic geoscience into context in the wider field of forensic science. For actual cases situations, experts in appropriate sub-disciplines should be consulted.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my profound gratitude to Raymond Murray, without whose encouragement this book would never have been written. My thanks to Jack Crelling, whose kindness in offering help as I started teaching forensic geology was of incalculable value. I would also like to thank Alastair Ruffell, Bill Schneck, Erich Junger, and Laurance Donnelly. Other people who provided help are Maureen Bottrell, Nelson Eby, Marianne Stam, and Kevin Williams. Thank you to Darrel Kassahn for his help turning some of my sketches into usable graphics. I am grateful to the forensic geology community, and to anyone I forgot, my apologies and thanks.

I am grateful to Ian Francis, Delia Sandford, and Kelvin Matthews for their patience and to Tim Bettsworth for his clarity. Thanks to my anonymous reviewers for their comments. I hope that in the future I will have the opportunity to add several new cases and the additional chapters suggested.

Finally, I have to thank my family for putting up with this project. I dedicate this book to my children, Nathan and Leta, with all my love.