Actually now that I have your attention, more specifically:
What 1 rock/stone (that is in solid form) is the Earth most composed of?
Basalt.
Oxygen, silicon and aluminum
Those are not rocks.
Monocrystal iron?
Well, it’s one of the theories.
A lot of the substances that make up most of the earth are probably not ‘rock’ or ‘stone’ in the traditional sense, if you consider the interior as well as the relative surface. Then again, a lot of that is indeed guesswork, because we can’t go and test substances at the center of the earth.
This link, especially the ‘chemical composition’ section, seems to have some useful and authoritative-sounding info: http://www.austmus.gov.au/geoscience/earth/structure.htm
Is silicon definitively out of the running? I thought most of the solid crust was silicon, but I guess most of it is broken up and mixed with other stuff.
The crust makes up a minuscule portion of the earth’s volume, less than 1% according to Wikipedia.
I think a more likely place to look is the mantle, which Wikipedia describes as containing around 70% of the earth’s volume. Someone more knowledgeable than I with chemical structures and geology can parse through and determine which item that qualifies is most prevalent.
(fixed link)
That’s what you think.
I was thinking peridotite, though wiki says it’s the most common in the upper mantle. Not sure if that’s because the lower mantle is a mixture that can’t really be discussed as “rocks,” or if there’s another more common composition to that portion.
I’m going with Carl Sagan’s answer:
Starstuff.
Good point. But those elements (really just Si and O) do combine to make most of the non-core earth. The problem with geology is that it is too complicated to speak in such simple terms as “What 1 rock/stone (that is in solid form) is the Earth most composed of?” We’ve only gone what, 10 kilometers in? Seismic studies and analysis of magma gives us a slim glimpse at what is going on below the Moho.
The question needs to be more specific. Basalt covers all the ocean’s floor’s which is 2/3 of the earth’s surface, so most people say it is the most common rock in the earth’s crust.
But on the continents, sedimentary rock cover 3/4 of dry land. Shale is the most common.
Deeper into the earth gets complicated. You’re getting into the rock cycle, where rocks can change form and rocks aren’t really named until they reach the surface anyway. But, just for the fun of it… the lower mantle is the deepest section of the mantle. I’m not sure if it has the most volume, but I assume it does. It’s solid rock and believed to be composed primarily of the minerals aluminous silicate perovskite. That could make it the most common rock on earth, although it isn’t really a named rock. I doubt that’s the answer the OP is looking for.
Something in the peridotite range compositionally, but with elements of eclogite and other ultramafics. Something with olivine, pyroxene, garnets, spinels…diamonds! OK, maybe no diamonds.
At a really, really rough first approximation, garnet lherzolite is a best fit for the rock most common in the “solid” Earth (since the lower mantle is more plastic than solid). If I were to pick a single mineral (and the OP’s usage of the decidedly unprecise term stone makes me uncertain if it’s rock or mineral s/he wants here), it’d be forsterite, olivine, although its wadsleyite and ringwoodite polymorphs may be more common en masse. Or perovskite polymorphs thereof, haven’t really looked into it. I’m going by my cursory knowledge of kimberlite xenoliths and greenstone belt genesis here.
The core, of course, is a Fe/Ni ball bearing. But only in the middle.
Well folks to be honest I really didn’t think the question would make so much trouble for yous guys.
Like with Fubaya for instance, on one part of the Earth 1 kinda stone is the most common and another part something else is more common- but really doesn’t it just come down to what is bigger/denser? I’m not interested in what we don’t know folks, I’m interested in “thus far”.
I don’t really care if it’s a gem or a mineral, a stone, a plate or whatever else is a category.
And really the question was more in tune to the words " What 1 solid (fill in the blank)is the Earth most composed of?"
Basically, based on what knowledge we have of the density of the layers of the Earth, common sense would tell me to pick the densest solid layer of the Earth and try and figure out what the most plentiful, nameable, solid form exists there. That in my mind would be the (at least for our current knowledge) rock or stone that the Earth is composed most of.
If my tone sounds incorrect any, please forgive it. It was only through the many submissions here that I was able to narrow the choices down to some kind of volcanic rock or peridot… much stranger results than I was originally thinking.
I have to be so vague so that my use for this knowledge doesn’t influence the replies.
But basically anything goes as long as it’s a solid of some kind that the Earth is made of.
Density’s got nothing to do with it - it comes down to volume. I’ll stick with olivine for an answer, closely followed by enstatite pyroxene.
Ringwoodite is back in the news. “Earth may have underground ocean three times that on surface”; this link links to a pay-to-view Science article.
(Should I have resurrected this zombie, started a new Mundane-Pointless thread, or just abstained altogether?)
Another article, not behind pay wall.
You can’t think of this water as a liquid, though. It’s a form of bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
In geological time, it’s not dead yet.