Titanium Silicon
What are the most abundant metals in the earth's crust?
I know it starts with Aluminum, and im almost 100% sure Iron and Calcium are next, but my chemistry teacher says that Iron is the fourth (our science book says Iron is the fourth most abundant ELEMENT in the earth's crust, not metal) and he won't listen to me when I tell him that.
The top ten elements according to many sources are as follows: Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, Potassium, Titanium, and Hydrogen, but he considers Silicon a metal (it's a metalloid) and he says that I'm missing an element between Aluminum and Iron. I would really appreciate it if you would help us clear this up.
Let's reach a bit here.
He is a chemistry teacher, not an earth science teacher, so he may be using a different definition of "most abundant".
If you take the ten most common elements of the earth's crust on a weight basis:
oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, titanium, hydrogen
and reorder them using a mole basis:
oxygen, silicon, aluminum, hydrogen, iron, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, titanium
then hydrogen, by virtue of it's low atomic weight, appears much higher on the list, between aluminum and iron.
If your teacher is stretching the definition of metal to include "metalloid", then he may also be stretching to include hydrogen, which under extreme pressure forms metallic hydrogen.
Using molar abundance and a loose definition of metal gives you:
silicon, aluminum, hydrogen, iron, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, titanium
as the metals in the crust in order of abundance.
(For completeness, the 11th most abundant element by weight in the earth's crust is nickel, with one-sixth the abundance of titanium and a higher atomic weight than any of the top ten, so it does not enter the reordered top ten list. Likewise, the low atomic weight metals that are not in the top ten by weight--lithium and beryllium--are much too scarce to crack the mole basis top ten.)
(If you were free to use any definitions, you could claim that the under enough pressue the entire earth is made up of neutronium, Antropoff's "element zero".)
2pc MARLIN TERMINATOR Big Game Spinning Rod
