Most Abundant Dissolved Elements in Seawater

About This Dataset

This chart ranks the most abundant elements dissolved in seawater by concentration in grams per litre, excluding the oxygen and hydrogen of the water itself. Chlorine and sodium, the components of common salt, dominate ocean chemistry.

✨ AI Insight

Chlorine (19.4 g/L) and sodium (10.8 g/L) overwhelmingly dominate the dissolved content of seawater, together forming the sodium chloride that makes the oceans salty. These two elements account for the large majority of sea salt by mass. Magnesium (1.28 g/L) is a distant third, followed by sulfur, calcium and potassium, each below half a gram per litre. After potassium the concentrations plunge: bromine, carbon, strontium and boron appear only in trace amounts measured in thousandths of a gram or less. The steep drop-off, from chlorine at 19.4 down to boron at 0.0045 g/L, a factor of more than 4,000, shows that ocean salinity is essentially a two-element story, with every other element contributing only minor chemical flavouring.

Source: Abundances of the elements (data page)

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Chlorine leads with 19 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 3 · median: 0.

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Gap in All Time: Chlorine is 4311.1× larger than Boron.