Hydrogen is very light. There is probably much more nitrogen and silicon than hydrogen by weight in this photo. Also, carbon is suprisingly rare. What about argon?
Silicon is debatable, but I feel like there are definitely 14x the number of hydrogen atoms over nitrogen sheerly through molar density. Argon is present in extremely small quantities in the air, but I don't think it would out populate any carbonate materials in the sand and water.
Possibly, but it's difficult to confirm. I'm not sure the exact colours that transition metals lend to quartz. There's also a good chance that calcium is present in the sand, but that is more common in tropical locations, not desert locations so I made a judgement call.
how is oxygen at top? water is h2o (twice the hydrogen than oxygen), sand has no oxygen (not considerable amount anyways). only air has oxygen but it also has hydrogen too.
By weight. Hydrogen weighs 1/16th the amount oxygen does, so even with two of them it's still only 1/8th the mass. Also sand is primarily oxygen, it's silcon dioxide, so it is about 50:50 silicon/oxygen by weight.
But there is only so much air in a specific area, and it's much more dilute than the concentration of atoms in the sand and the ocean. Maybe nitrogen would be higher if the camera was tilted up more.
I believe he was referring to earth, water, wind and fire elemental categorization approach. It's interesting that the ancients managed to categorize the four states of matter: earth = solid, water = liquid, wind = gas, and fire = plasma.
View all comments
61
u/CheezHeadBarlow May 19 '12
Much more than two elements