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The abundance of the chemical elements is a measure of the occurrences of the chemical elements relative to all other elements in a given environment. Abundance is measured in one of three ways: by mass fraction (in commercial contexts often called weight fraction), by mole fraction (fraction of atoms by numerical count, or sometimes fraction of molecules in gases), or by volume fraction.
The abundance of elements in Earth's crust is shown in tabulated form with the estimated crustal abundance for each chemical element shown as mg/kg, or parts per million (ppm) by mass (10,000 ppm = 1%).
Oxygen is the third most abundant chemical element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium. [68] About 0.9% of the Sun's mass is oxygen. [19] Oxygen constitutes 49.2% of the Earth's crust by mass [69] as part of oxide compounds such as silicon dioxide and is the most abundant element by mass in the Earth's crust.
Iron is the most abundant element by mass in the Earth, but most of it is locked up in the Earth’s core, 1,800 miles beneath our feet, Wade said. Despite this, life forms rely on iron for survival.
Nitrogen is the most common pure element in the earth, making up 78.1% of the volume of the atmosphere [9] (75.5% by mass), around 3.89 million gigatonnes (3.89 × 10 18 kg). Despite this, it is not very abundant in Earth's crust, making up somewhere around 19 parts per million of this, on par with niobium, gallium, and lithium.
The troposphere is the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. It extends from Earth's surface to an average height of about 12 km (7.5 mi; 39,000 ft), although this altitude varies from about 9 km (5.6 mi; 30,000 ft) at the geographic poles to 17 km (11 mi; 56,000 ft) at the Equator, [23] with some variation due
Arsenic is the 53rd most abundant element in the Earth's crust, comprising about 1.5 parts per million (0.00015%). [48] Typical background concentrations of arsenic do not exceed 3 ng/m 3 in the atmosphere; 100 mg/kg in soil; 400 μg/kg in vegetation; 10 μg/L in freshwater and 1.5 μg/L in seawater. [49]
Although oxygen is the most abundant element in Earth's crust, due to its high reactivity it mostly exists in compound forms such as water, carbon dioxide, iron oxides and silicates. Before photosynthesis evolved, Earth's atmosphere had no free diatomic elemental oxygen (O 2). [2]