🌍🧪 All 118 Chemical Elements — How Abundant Are They on Earth?
Dear Friends! Look around you. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the rocks beneath your feet, the soil in your garden, the flowers in your balcony, the books in your library, your own body, the distant stars and even the mobile device in your hands are all connected by one fundamental idea: chemistry.
The periodic table contains 118 officially recognized chemical elements, from hydrogen (H) to oganesson (Og). However, these elements do not all have an established, measurable and persistent natural abundance on Earth. Some are extraordinarily abundant, while others occur only in tiny trace quantities. For several of the heaviest elements, there is not even an established quantitative natural abundance.
This science article explores how the 118 elements compare when their estimated abundance across selected natural Earth reservoirs is visualized together.
Important: This visualization estimates abundance across selected natural Earth reservoirs; it does not assign a measured abundance to every one of the 118 elements.
What Does “Abundance” Mean?
The word abundance can have more than one meaning in chemistry and Earth science. In many contexts, it refers to the relative amounts of different isotopes of an element. That is isotopic abundance, which is different from what is being shown here.
In this article, “estimated natural abundance” is a custom term used for the modeled mass fraction of an element across the selected natural Earth reservoirs. It is not intended to represent the conventional isotopic-abundance meaning of the term.
The model considers four major reservoirs:
- 🌍 Earth’s crust
- 🌊 Oceans
- 🌫️ Atmosphere
- 🌱 Biosphere
The results are expressed primarily in parts per million (ppm) by mass.
What does ppm mean?
1 ppm means approximately one part of an element by mass in one million parts of the modeled material.
For example:
- 1 ppm = 0.0001%
- 10 ppm = 0.001%
- 1,000 ppm = 0.1%
- 10,000 ppm = 1%
The infographic includes all 118 officially recognized elements. However, only elements for which sufficiently established quantitative natural-terrestrial estimates were available receive calculated abundance values. Elements without an established quantitative value are shown at the minimum visual scale rather than being assigned an invented abundance.
An important boundary
This is not a complete chemical inventory of the entire Earth.
The model includes the crust, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere, but does not include Earth’s mantle or core. Therefore, the calculated values should be interpreted as a composite estimate for these selected Earth reservoirs rather than as the measured composition of the entire planet.
How Were the Abundances Calculated?
The composite abundance was calculated by combining estimated elemental compositions of the individual reservoirs while weighting each reservoir according to its approximate mass.
The basic calculation
Cᵢ = [Σ(Mⱼ × fᵢⱼ) / ΣMⱼ] × 10⁶
where:
- Cᵢ = composite abundance of element i, expressed in ppm by mass
- Mⱼ = mass of reservoir j
- fᵢⱼ = estimated mass fraction of element i in reservoir j
- j = the individual reservoirs included in the model: crust, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere
In simpler terms:
Composite elemental abundance = total estimated mass of an element in the modeled reservoirs ÷ total mass of those reservoirs × 1,000,000
This distinction is important because the reservoirs have enormously different masses.
The reservoir masses determine the weighting, while the elemental mass fractions determine how much each element contributes.
🌍 Why Are Some Elements So Much More Abundant Than Others?
The distribution of elements on Earth is the result of several interconnected processes, including:
- Nuclear processes that created the elements
- The stability of different atomic nuclei
- Formation of the Solar System
- Geological differentiation
- Mineral formation
- Chemical reactions
- Weathering and erosion
- Ocean chemistry
- Atmospheric processes
- Biological activity
Earth’s elements therefore have very different histories.
Some became major components of rocks and minerals. Others became concentrated in oceans, the atmosphere or living organisms. Many remain dispersed at extremely low concentrations.
🥇 Oxygen — The Most Abundant Element in This Model
According to the composite model, oxygen (O) has an estimated abundance of approximately:
481,471 ppm
That corresponds to about:
approximately 48.1% by mass
of the modeled reservoir system.
This enormous value is not surprising when Earth’s surface environment is considered.
Oxygen is a major component of:
- Silicate minerals
- Oxides
- Carbonates
- Water
- Living organisms
Earth’s crust contains enormous quantities of oxygen chemically bound to silicon, aluminium, iron, calcium, magnesium and other elements.
The oceans add another enormous reservoir of oxygen through water.
Consequently, oxygen dominates the composite abundance calculation.
🥈 Silicon — The Backbone of Earth’s Rocks
Silicon (Si) has an estimated abundance of approximately:
266,516 ppm
or about 26.7% by mass of the modeled reservoirs.
Silicon is especially important because it forms the structural framework of many of Earth’s most abundant minerals.
The most important group is the silicates.
Silicate minerals contain silicon and oxygen together with elements such as aluminium, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium and potassium.
This is why silicon and oxygen occupy such dominant positions in the visualization.
Aluminium, Iron and Calcium
Several other elements occur in substantial quantities.
Approximately:
77,781 ppm
Aluminium is abundant in many crustal minerals, particularly aluminosilicates.
Iron (Fe)
Approximately:
53,209 ppm
Iron is a major constituent of many minerals and rocks.
However, there is an important limitation:
The Earth’s core is excluded from this model.
Earth’s core is believed to contain enormous quantities of iron, along with nickel and other elements. Because the core is not part of the modeled reservoirs, the value shown here should not be interpreted as Earth’s total iron abundance.
Calcium (Ca)
Approximately:
39,243 ppm
Calcium occurs widely in minerals such as carbonates and silicates and is also biologically important.
Sodium, Magnesium and Potassium
The next group contains several elements that are abundant both geologically and biologically.
|
Element |
Symbol |
Estimated abundance |
|
Sodium |
Na |
≈22,881 ppm |
|
Magnesium |
Mg |
≈22,090 ppm |
|
Potassium |
K |
≈19,774 ppm |
Sodium and magnesium are particularly important components of seawater and minerals.
Potassium is abundant in many crustal minerals and is also an essential nutrient for living organisms.
Hydrogen — Extremely Important, But Not a Major Mass Fraction
Hydrogen is the lightest element and is fundamental to:
- Water
- Organic compounds
- Living organisms
- Stars
- Many geological and atmospheric processes
The composite estimate is approximately:
7,087 ppm
or about 0.71% by mass.
It is important not to interpret this value as meaning hydrogen is rare in an absolute sense.
Hydrogen atoms are extremely numerous in water and biological molecules. However, the mass composition of the selected Earth reservoirs is dominated by oxygen-rich water and mineral-rich materials containing oxygen, silicon, aluminium, iron and other heavier elements.
Hydrogen’s low atomic mass becomes particularly relevant when comparing mass abundance with abundance by number of atoms.
🌱 Carbon and Nitrogen — Small Mass Fractions, Huge Biological Importance
Two elements illustrate why abundance and importance are not the same thing.
Approximately:
191 ppm
Carbon forms the structural basis of organic chemistry.
It is present in:
- Living organisms
- Carbon dioxide
- Carbonates
- Fossil organic matter
- Soil
- The oceans
Approximately:
173 ppm
Nitrogen is essential for:
- Proteins
- DNA and RNA
- Amino acids
- Biological cycles
- Atmospheric chemistry
Although carbon and nitrogen are far less abundant by mass than oxygen or silicon in this model, life depends heavily on both.
Other Important Elements
Several elements occupy the middle portion of the abundance spectrum.
Examples include:
- Chlorine (Cl): ≈1,172 ppm
- Phosphorus (P): ≈992 ppm
- Manganese (Mn): ≈898 ppm
- Sulfur (S): ≈379 ppm
- Barium (Ba): ≈402 ppm
- Strontium (Sr): ≈350 ppm
- Fluorine (F): ≈553 ppm
Their distributions are controlled by different combinations of mineral chemistry, seawater chemistry, biological cycling and geological processes.
🔬 The Trace-Element World
As we move through the periodic table, abundances become dramatically smaller.
Many elements occur at concentrations measured in:
- ppm
- ppb (parts per billion)
- even smaller quantities
For example:
Gold (Au)
The estimated composite abundance is approximately:
0.0038 ppm
This is equivalent to roughly:
3.8 parts per billion (ppb)
Compare this with iron:
Fe ≈53,209 ppm
The modeled abundance of iron is roughly 14 million times greater than that of gold.
Yet gold has enormous economic and cultural importance.
This illustrates an important principle:
Economic value does not depend on abundance alone.
Other factors include:
- Ore concentration
- Ease or difficulty of extraction
- Processing costs
- Industrial applications
- Demand
- Recycling
- Availability of economically exploitable deposits
- Geographical distribution
- Geopolitical factors
An element can therefore be relatively rare without automatically being economically valuable, and an abundant element can still be expensive to extract in a useful form.
☢️ Radioactive Elements
The heavy end of the periodic table introduces another complication: radioactivity.
Some radioactive elements occur naturally because they have sufficiently long-lived primordial isotopes that survived from the formation of the Solar System.
Two important examples are:
Thorium (Th)
Approximately:
9.07 ppm
Uranium (U)
Approximately:
2.55 ppm
These elements are naturally occurring and have very long-lived radioactive isotopes.
Some shorter-lived radioactive nuclides are continually produced as products of radioactive decay. Their abundance depends on the particular nuclide, its half-life, its position in a decay chain and the environment in which it occurs.
Therefore, radioactive-element abundance cannot be treated in exactly the same way as the abundance of stable elements.
⚛️ Why Some Elements Are Shown at the Minimum Size
The infographic includes all 118 elements, but several elements cannot be assigned a reliable quantitative natural-terrestrial abundance within this model.
These include elements such as:
- Technetium (Tc)
- Promethium (Pm)
- Astatine (At)
- Francium (Fr)
as well as many of the transuranium elements.
For these elements, the issue is not necessarily that absolutely no atom could ever exist naturally on Earth.
Instead:
There is no sufficiently established quantitative natural terrestrial abundance that can responsibly be used as a numerical input to this composite model.
They are therefore displayed using the minimum visual score.
This is especially important for many transuranium elements. Their observed production and quantities are overwhelmingly associated with artificial nuclear reactions, although the question of extremely small natural occurrence can be more nuanced for particular elements and isotopes.
The infographic therefore avoids assigning false precision where reliable quantitative data are unavailable.
📊 Why Is the Font Size Logarithmic?
If the actual abundance values were converted directly into font sizes, oxygen, silicon and aluminium would dominate the entire graphic, while trace elements would become practically invisible.
The infographic therefore uses a logarithmic visual scale.
The visual score ranges from:
4 → 72
where:
- 72 represents the largest visual size
- 4 represents the minimum visual size
The score is not an abundance unit.
It is a logarithmically scaled visual representation derived from the estimated abundance values.
This allows elements spanning many orders of magnitude in abundance to remain visible in a single infographic.
🌍 What the Infographic Really Shows
The size of each element’s name provides an immediate visual impression of its relative abundance within the modeled reservoirs.
The largest names correspond to elements such as:
Oxygen → Silicon → Aluminium → Iron → Calcium → Sodium → Magnesium → Potassium
while progressively smaller names represent elements occurring in much lower estimated quantities.
At the extreme low-abundance end, some elements are shown at the minimum scale because a reliable quantitative natural-terrestrial value is unavailable.
This means the graphic should be read as a visual map of estimated elemental abundance, rather than as a conventional periodic table.
🧪 From the Periodic Table to Planet Earth
The periodic table may look like a simple arrangement of boxes, but every element has a much deeper story.
The elements themselves were produced through nuclear processes occurring long before—and during—the formation of our Solar System.
Once Earth formed, geological and chemical processes began redistributing those elements.
Over billions of years:
- Minerals formed and transformed.
- Rocks weathered and eroded.
- Oceans accumulated dissolved ions.
- The atmosphere evolved.
- Life emerged and began cycling elements.
- Geological processes concentrated some elements into ores.
- Radioactive elements continued to decay.
The result is the complex elemental distribution we see today.
⚖️ Abundance Is Not Importance
One of the most interesting lessons from this comparison is that abundance and importance are completely different concepts.
Oxygen is enormously abundant and essential for many forms of life.
Carbon is much less abundant by mass but forms the chemical foundation of known biological systems.
Phosphorus occurs at a relatively low concentration yet is essential for DNA, RNA, ATP and cellular energy transfer.
Iron is abundant and biologically important.
Iodine is present in tiny quantities but is essential for thyroid hormone production.
Gold is extremely rare compared with major rock-forming elements, yet its chemical stability, physical properties and scarcity have made it culturally and economically significant.
An element’s importance therefore cannot be determined simply by looking at its abundance.
📚 Sources, Methodology & Limitations
The underlying reservoir data were assembled from published reference values and geochemical compilations. The final 118-element values in the infographic were calculated from those inputs using the composite method described above; they are not directly reproduced from a single published abundance table.
For reproducibility, the final dataset should be understood as a derived model: individual reservoir composition data and approximate reservoir masses are combined mathematically to produce the composite values.
Differences between source datasets, regional variation and missing quantitative data for some elements mean that the results should not be interpreted as independently measured whole-Earth abundances.
Crust
Crustal elemental abundances were based on established geochemical abundance compilations and reference datasets.
Oceans
Oceanic contributions were based on published seawater concentration estimates. Major dissolved elements are relatively well characterized, while trace-element concentrations can vary considerably depending on location, depth and geochemical conditions.
Atmosphere
Atmospheric composition was based on standard atmospheric composition data, including reference information from NOAA.
Biosphere
Biosphere composition was based on published elemental-composition compilations, including data associated with Preston E. Deevey and related work.
Approximate reservoir masses used in the model
|
Reservoir |
Approximate mass |
|
Earth’s crust |
2.367 × 10²² kg |
|
Oceans |
1.37 × 10²¹ kg |
|
Atmosphere |
5.137 × 10¹⁸ kg |
|
Biosphere |
1.148 × 10¹⁶ kg |
These are approximate reservoir masses used as model inputs, not exact measured masses.
Calculation
For each element:
Composite abundance (ppm) = [Total estimated mass of the element in all modeled reservoirs ÷ Total mass of all modeled reservoirs] × 1,000,000
In mathematical terms:
Cᵢ = [Σ(Mⱼ × fᵢⱼ) ÷ ΣMⱼ] × 1,000,000
where:
- Cᵢ = composite abundance of element i, in ppm by mass
- Mⱼ = mass of reservoir j
- fᵢⱼ = estimated mass fraction of element i in reservoir j
- j = crust, oceans, atmosphere or biosphere
The calculated value is expressed in ppm by mass.
Included reservoirs
The model includes:
- Crust
- Oceans
- Atmosphere
- Biosphere
Excluded reservoirs
The model does not include:
- Earth’s mantle
- Earth’s core
Consequently, the results should not be interpreted as the complete elemental composition of the entire planet.
Elements without quantitative estimates
Where a sufficiently reliable quantitative natural-terrestrial abundance was not available, the element was not assigned an invented numerical value. Instead, it was displayed at the minimum visual scale.
⚠️ How Exact Are These Numbers?
These values should be regarded as estimated composite abundances, not measurements with unlimited precision.
Several factors introduce uncertainty:
- Natural geological variation
- Different reference datasets
- Regional differences in crustal composition
- Variations in seawater chemistry
- Atmospheric variability
- Uncertainty in biosphere mass and composition
- Incomplete data for trace elements
- Difficulty quantifying extremely rare radioactive elements
- Exclusion of the mantle and core
Therefore, the purpose of the infographic is to reveal the relative scale and fascinating distribution of the elements, rather than to claim that every number represents a precisely measured global quantity.
🌎 The Bigger Picture
From oxygen-rich rocks and oceans to trace quantities of gold and radioactive elements, Earth contains an extraordinary chemical spectrum.
Some elements occur in enormous quantities. Others exist only in tiny traces. Some are essential for life despite their low abundance, while others are valuable because of their unusual physical or chemical properties.
And at the far end of the periodic table, the distinction between naturally occurring, transiently produced and artificially synthesized elements becomes increasingly important.
The periodic table is therefore more than a collection of boxes.
It is a story of nuclear physics, planetary formation, geology, chemistry and life—all written into the material world around us.
Explore our Science Book in English at
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