Abundances of chemical elements in the Earth’s crust

The evaluation of the abundances of chemical elements in the Earth’s crust is a pivotal geochemical problem. Its first solutions in the early 20th century formed the empirical groundwork for geochemistry and justified concepts about the unity of the material of the Universe, the genesis of the chemical elements, and the geochemical differentiation of the Earth. The accumulation of newly obtained data called for the revision of this problem, and a series of papers by A.P. Vinogradov, which were published in Geokhimiya in 1956–1962, presented reevaluated contents of elements in the continental crust. In these papers, A.P. Vinogradov relied on the classic idea of the geochemical balance of the sedimentary…