Most Abundant Dissolved Elements in Seawater
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Most Abundant Dissolved Elements in SeawaterChlorine (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.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Abundances of the elements (data page)
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 10 observations
- Measure
- Concentration in Seawater (g/L)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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