The backbone of the EarthWhat are the most abundant elements in the Earth? Well, the Earth has a big
The backbone of the EarthWhat are the most abundant elements in the Earth? Well, the Earth has a big iron core, so iron has to be one of them. The solid earth, including the mantle and the crust, is held together by bonds between the other 2 most abundant elements in the Earth: silicon and oxygen.Bonded together, silicon and oxygen form a tetrahedron like you see here, with 4 oxygen atoms (shown in red) surrounding the central silicon atom (shown in grey). The negatively charged oxygen atoms are much larger than the positively charged silicon atom, so a tetrahedron with the small silicon in the middle is an ideal fit.Pretty much every abundant mineral in the solid Earth is made up of different assemblages of these tetrahedra. Different positively charged elements such as iron and magnesium can fit into the structure alongside these tetrahedra to make up the main minerals of the mantle (olivine, wadsleyite, ringwoodite, and bridgmanite).If the rock doesn’t have enough positively charged cations to balance out the charges, the silica tetrahedra can instead share oxygen atoms between their edges, forming longer chains or frameworks. This setup is common in Earth’s crust, where minerals like plagioclase and quartz are the most abundant.-JBBImage credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon–oxygen_tetrahedron#mediaviewer/File:Silicate-tetrahedron-3D-balls.png -- source link
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