Element Abundances of China‘s Continental Crust and Its Sedimentary Layer and Upper Continental Crust

Element abundances of China’s continental crust and its sedimentary layer and upper continental crust

China’s continental crust (CCC) has an average thickness of 47km, with the upper continental crust (CUCC) being 31 km and the sedimentary layer(CSL) 5 km in thickness. The CCC, CUCC and CSL measure 12.437 × 10⁻¹⁷, 8.005 × 10⁻¹⁷ and 1.146 × 10¹⁷ metric tons in mass, respectively. The mass ratio of the upper continental crust to the lower one is 1.8:1. The element abundances were calculated for the CCC, CUCC and CSL respectively in terms of the chemical compositions of 2246 samples of various types and some complementary trace element data. The total abundance of 13 major elements accounts for 99.6% of the CCC mass while the other minor elements only account for 0.4%. REE characteristics, the abundance ratios of element pairs and the amounts of ore-forming elements are also discussed in the present paper.