What’s the most common metal on the Earth? I was recently asking myself this question, which I suppose stemmed from my years of wondering how much metal was on the Earth. I discovered that, not only is there a much higher quantity of metal on the Earth than I previously thought, there is also a great quantity of metals that are scarcely discussed; when was the last time you heard someone talk about vanadium, rubidium, or lanthanum outside a chemistry class? It was likely long ago, if ever, yet these metals are all but scarce on the Earth. So, what are the most common metals?
While oxygen is the most common element of the 94 naturally occurring elements in the Earth’s crust, aluminum is the most common metal; like many metals, aluminum, due to its reactivity, does not naturally occur in its metallic form, but in compounds such as sands, clays, stones, and other minerals. Aluminum is so difficult and energy consuming to extract that it used to be more valuable than gold, but now it has become much cheaper and more ubiquitous; it takes about 27 kWh (90,000 Btu or 23,000 Calories) to extract and process 1 pound of aluminum. On the other hand, francium is the least common metal; there is only about an ounce of francium scattered across the Earth at a time. Francium is randomly appearing and disappearing all over the Earth; it is formed during the decay of some radioactive metals and quickly destroyed because of its intense radioactivity. When unstable elements radioactively decay, they physically rip themselves apart, ejecting highly energetic particles or photons and leaving behind a different element with a lower atomic number.
The Naturally Occurring Metals by Abundance
It is quite difficult to give the exact amount of each metal within the entire Earth, especially when there are vast expanses of material in the Earth’s mantle and core which we cannot accurately measure; there is simply too much heat and pressure for us to visit the interior of the Earth, which ranges from about 1,000º to 10,000º Fahrenheit and 3,000,000 to 53,000,000 PSI, which is well above the temperature and pressure required to form diamonds. Furthermore, you would have to ascend thousands of miles to return to the surface of the Earth. For these reasons, I will only give you the composition of the Earth’s crust; the crust does contain all 94 naturally occurring elements, besides, most of our materials came from the crust anyway.
Here is a list of the naturally occurring metals ranked by abundance in the Earth’s crust along with their approximate masses. Alloys, which include steel, brass, and bronze, will not be present on this list, since an alloy is the combination of two or more chemical elements, and I will only be focusing on the elemental metals in this post.
- Aluminum (2.5 quintillion tons)
- Iron (1.7 quintillion tons)
- Calcium (1.3 quintillion tons)
- Sodium (720 quadrillion tons)
- Magnesium (711 quadrillion tons)
- Potassium (637 quadrillion tons)
- Titanium (172 quadrillion tons)
- Manganese (29 quadrillion tons)
- Barium (13 quadrillion tons)
- Strontium (11 quadrillion tons)
- Zirconium (5 quadrillion tons)
- Vanadium (3.7 quadrillion tons)
- Chromium (3.1 quadrillion tons)
- Rubidium (2.7 quadrillion tons)
- Nickel (2.6 quadrillion tons)
- Zinc (2.1 quadrillion tons)
- Cerium (2 quadrillion tons)
- Copper (1.8 quadrillion tons)
- Neodymium (1.3 quadrillion tons)
- Lanthanum (1.2 quadrillion tons)
- Yttrium (1 quadrillion tons)
- Cobalt (763 trillion tons)
- Scandium (671 trillion tons)
- Lithium (610 trillion tons)
- Niobium (610 trillion tons)
- Gallium (580 trillion tons)
- Lead (427 trillion tons)
- Tin (299 trillion tons)
- Thorium (293 trillion tons)
- Praseodymium (281 trillion tons)
- Samarium (215 trillion tons)
- Gadolinium (189 trillion tons)
- Dysprosium (159 trillion tons)
- Erbium (107 trillion tons)
- Ytterbium (98 trillion tons)
- Hafnium (92 trillion tons)
- Caesium (92 trillion tons)
- Beryllium (85 trillion tons)
- Uranium (82 trillion tons)
- Tantalum (61 trillion tons)
- Europium (61 trillion tons)
- Tungsten (55 trillion tons)
- Holmium (40 trillion tons)
- Molybdenum (37 trillion tons)
- Terbium (37 trillion tons)
- Thallium (26 trillion tons)
- Lutetium (24 trillion tons)
- Thulium (16 trillion tons)
- Indium (7.6 trillion tons)
- Cadmium (4.6 trillion tons)
- Mercury (2.6 trillion tons)
- Silver (2.3 trillion tons)
- Palladium (458 billion tons)
- Bismuth (259 billion tons)
- Platinum (153 billion tons)
- Gold (122 billion tons)
- Osmium (46 billion tons)
- Ruthenium (31 billion tons)
- Iridium (31 billion tons)
- Rhodium (31 billion tons)
- Rhenium (24 billion tons)
- Protactinium (43 million tons)
- Radium (27 million tons)
- Polonium (6,100 tons)
- Plutonium (915 tons)
- Neptunium (92 tons)
- Technetium (41 tons)
- Actinium (18 tons)
- Promethium (1.2 pounds)
- Francium (1 ounce)
Fun fact: the metal in this post’s image is one of the top ten metals on the list; bonus points if you can guess which metal it is!
All of these 70 metals exist naturally on the Earth, just below our feet. While it is true that many of these metals are mostly found within very specific regions of the Earth, those deposits exist all over the Earth.
Despite the prevalence of these 70 metals, numerous are hard to extract, many are at least slightly toxic, and several have almost no known uses, therefore, we only encounter a dozen or so of these metals in our daily lives, however, the use of rare Earth metals in technology has brought more metals into our lives, such as cerium, europium, and ytterbium.
The list emphasizes some strange facts, for instance, there is apparently 672 times more uranium than gold by mass! This fact would be fairly mundane if uranium was much more dense than gold, which would mean that the volumes of the two metals are equivalent for the given quantities, however, the density of uranium is actually slightly less than that of gold, which makes the total volume of uranium much greater than the volume of gold, 683 times more volume, to be precise.
There is an enormous amount of material on the Earth, of which we have only used a small portion to construct the billions of houses, computers, cars, and everything between. We are extracting billions of tons of iron each year, which sounds like a huge quantity, but it is only 0.00000007%, or 70 billionths of a percent, of the iron in the Earth’s crust. This means it would theoretically take us 1.4 billion years to run out of iron at this rate, if we ignore recycling.
Which is your favorite naturally occurring metal, and why?
Onward American 