The USGS has suspended the distribution of the widely used whole rock reference materials BHVO, BCR and BIR. The goal of this work is to identify a material as similar as possible to the original BIR Islandic basalt. This material can then undergo an ISO-compliant certification of the whole rock powder major and trace element contents.
The sampling quarry east of Reykjavik has multiple basalt flows and it is not known which one was originally sampled in 1980 for production of above mentioned reference materials. In this study, three samples were tested to see which is most similar to what was published by Flanigan (1984). Here, the results of this exploratory sample collection are presented, but note that these data are not part of the certification process or represent certified results.

Three basalt samples each of around 500 grams were collected at an abandoned quarry circa 12 km east of Reykjavik, Iceland. The samples were ground to <63 µm using an agate mortar.
Major and minor element concentrations were determined on glass beads by xrf.
Some minor and trace elements were determined on whole rock digests using the standard 4 acid digestion.