## 1 Introduction  
The investigations of mineral and elemental composition of bulk sediments are extremely important in the field of marine geology because they are directly related to paleoclimate, source-to-sink processes, marine primary productivity and post-depositional changes. The main expression of those processes is the glacial-interglacial alternations along the Quaternary period, which produce contrasting depositional regimes on the continental shelf and on the slope on the Brazilian Margin [1, 2, 3, 4]. There are still uncertainties on how those processes express in terms of mineralogical and elemental abundances on slope environment in a tropical climate. This lack is related to the fact that minerals and elements are time-consuming, expensive, and need several grams of material that is completely destroyed during the measurements.  
The study of elemental ratios in marine sediment cores using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis is a valuable technique, which is cheap, rapid, and non-destructive, and so has enormous potentials for stratigraphic and paleoceanographic studies. XRF defines the concentrations of chemical elements and, consequently, minerals in the sample, or directly in the core, obtaining several key information from the past climate, oceanography and atmosphere (e.g., [1, 5, 6, 7]).  
The principle of XRF analysis is based on the excitation of electrons by incident X-radiation. The fluorescence energy is detected by a characteristic wavelength spectrum of specific elements, which permits the estimation of their relative abundances [8]. Although the XRF is the most common technique to analyze the elemental concentrations of the bulk marine sediments [9], some destructive techniques can be applied, using devices such as Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES).  
ICP is an atomic emission technique, which measures the energy of an atom that returns to the ground state by emitting a photon, passing from an excited state to a lower energy state. The number of photons emitted is proportional to the number of atoms of the element present [10]. Therefore, it is possible to analyze and identify the elements in the sample, by separating the emitted light into its spectral components, using a high-performance spectrometer. The ICP-OES reaches a precision and accuracy of 5% for major element ratios, as determined by analyzing certified standards of contaminated soils (SS-1 and SS-2 EnviroMAT), which gives an excellent validation reference to our study.  
The Olympus BTX II benchtop equipment combines XRF with X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques on stratigraphical samples or discrete specimens directly collected from cores. This equipment performs one measurement in 10-20 min technique and needs a very small amount of dry material (3 mg) with no particular preparation, which can be used again for other measurements because it is non-destructive. This analytical technique reveals detailed structural information about the crystallography of materials and can be also applied in several paleoceanographic/climatology studies [11; 12]. This XRD/XRF device is ideal to perform a general analysis of bulk material in the field and in the laboratory, by combining the techniques, allowing a better and more complete characterization of any given crystalline sample, that can be used in paleoceanographic or paleoclimatic studies [13; 14; 15] as well as in extraterrestrial missions [16; 17].  
Here, we investigate the efficiency of XRF measurements of major elements (Fe, Ti and Ca) using BTX II Benchtop, by comparing them with previous ICP-OES elemental analysis for a set of marine sediments recovered from piston core GL-451 (21\({}^{\circ}\)09.8\({}^{\prime}\) S; 39\({}^{\circ}\)57.2\({}^{\prime}\) W), located in the Brazilian Continental Margin [18], and compare the results obtained from this technique with data from XRD measurements to identified different patterns of terrigenous input to the studied area.