Lanthanides in granulometric fractions of Mediterranean soils. Can they be used as fingerprints of provenance? Martín García, Juan Manuel, 1973 Molinero García, Alberto Calero, J. Fernández-González, M. Virginia Párraga Martínez, Jesús Francisco Delgado Calvo-Flores, Rafael Highlights Are lanthanides from fine sand and clay genetically related to the geological materials? Lanthanide concentrations of fine sand and clay fit chronofunctions Pearson's r of lanthanide couples decreases when separation increases in the periodic table Free forms of clay are scavengers of lanthanides and concentrate HREE and cerium Sample preparation and chemical analysis were conducted by Emma Humphreys-Williams and Stanislav Strekopytov (Imaging and Analysis Centre, Natural History Museum, London, UK). This work was supported by a grant from Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad de España (‘Tipologías de Suelos Mediterráneos versus Cuarzo. En la frontera del conocimiento edafogenético’; Ref. CGL2016-80308-P). The authors thank Professor Margaret A. Oliver, an anonymous editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions that improved the final manuscript. We also thank Robert Abrahams (Bsc) for revising the English language. There is geochemical interest in the lanthanides because they behave like a group that is closely related to the parent materials during surface processes, although they also undergo fractionation as a result of supergene dynamics. We analysed lanthanide concentrations (ICPms) in the granulometric fractions fine sand, clay and free forms of clay (FFclay‐CDB and FFclay‐Ox: extracted with citrate‐dithionite‐sodium bicarbonate and with ammonium oxalate, respectively) from a soil chronosequence of Mediterranean soils. There was a relative enrichment of heavy rare earth elements (HREE) in the clay fraction and its free forms with respect to fine sand. The clay free forms behaved as scavengers of lanthanides, and oxidative scavenging of cerium (Ce) in FFclay‐CDB was also detected. Lanthanide concentrations (lanthanum to gadolinium in fine sand; terbium to lutetium in clay) varied with soil age, and chronofunctions were established. There was a strong positive collinearity between most of the lanthanide concentrations. Furthermore, the value of the correlation index (Pearson's r ) of the concentrations between couples of lanthanides (r CLC) decreased significantly with increasing separation between the elements in the periodic table; this has never been described in soils. Several geochemical properties and indices in the fine sand and clay soil fractions and in the geological materials of the Guadalquivir catchment showed, on the one hand, a genetic relation between them all, enabling the lanthanides to be used as fingerprints of provenance; on the other hand, fractionation between fine sand and clay showed these are actively involved in soil lanthanide dynamics. 2020-05-21T10:20:41Z 2020-05-21T10:20:41Z 2018-09-07 info:eu-repo/semantics/article J. M. Martín-García et al. Lanthanides in granulometric fractions of Mediterranean soils. Can they be used as fingerprints of provenance?. European Journal of Soil Science, March 2019, 70, 394–410 [https://doi.org/10.1111/ejss.12730] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/62168 10.1111/ejss.12730 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Wiley