the most abundant mineral group in earth's crust is
silicate minerals
title: Mineral text: Family, Tribe, Genus, and Species. The abundance and diversity of minerals is controlled directly by their chemistry, in turn dependent on elemental abundances in the Earth. The majority of minerals observed are derived from the Earth's crust. Eight elements account for most of the key components of minerals, due to their abundance in the crust. These eight elements, summing to over 98% of the crust by weight, are, in order of decreasing abundance: oxygen, silicon, aluminium, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium and potassium. Oxygen and silicon are by far the two most important – oxygen composes 47% of the crust by title: Mineral text: stacking groups of three layers ("abcabcabc"). Analogues to linked silica tetrahedra include SO (sulfate), PO (phosphate), AsO (arsenate), and VO (vanadate). The non-silicates have great economic importance, as they concentrate elements more than the silicate minerals do. The largest grouping of minerals by far are the silicates; most rocks are composed of greater than 95% silicate minerals, and over 90% of the Earth's crust is composed of these minerals. The two main constituents of silicates are silicon and oxygen, which are the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust. Other common elements in silicate minerals correspond to other common title: Earth text: winds is called the geoid. More precisely, the geoid is the surface of gravitational equipotential at mean sea level. Earth's mass is approximately (5,970 Yg). It is composed mostly of iron (32.1%), oxygen (30.1%), silicon (15.1%), magnesium (13.9%), sulfur (2.9%), nickel (1.8%), calcium (1.5%), and aluminium (1.4%), with the remaining 1.2% consisting of trace amounts of other elements. Due to mass segregation, the core region is estimated to be primarily composed of iron (88.8%), with smaller amounts of nickel (5.8%), sulfur (4.5%), and less than 1% trace elements. The most common rock constituents of the crust are nearly all oxides: title: Abundance of the chemical elements text: have larger ionic radii) and therefore more strongly concentrated in the continental crust than the heavier rare earth elements. In most rare earth ore deposits, the first four rare earth elements – lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, and neodymium – constitute 80% to 99% of the total amount of rare earth metal that can be found in the ore. The mass-abundance of the eight most abundant elements in the Earth's mantle (see main article above) is approximately: oxygen 45%, magnesium 23%, silicon 22%, iron 5.8%, calcium 2.3%, aluminum 2.2%, sodium 0.3%, potassium 0.3%. The mantle differs in elemental composition from the crust title: Mineral text: tenacity, cleavage, fracture, parting, specific gravity, magnetism, taste or smell, radioactivity, and reaction to acid. Minerals are classified by key chemical constituents; the two dominant systems are the Dana classification and the Strunz classification. Silicon and oxygen constitute approximately 75% of the Earth's crust, which translates directly into the predominance of silicate minerals. The silicate minerals compose over 90% of the Earth's crust. The silicate class of minerals is subdivided into six subclasses by the degree of polymerization in the chemical structure. All silicate minerals have a base unit of a [SiO] silica tetrahedron—that is, a silicon cation coordinated by