Goldschmidt Classification - Chalcophile Elements

Chalcophile Elements

Ag, As, Bi, Cd, Cu, Ga, Ge, Hg, In, Pb, Po, S, Sb, Se, Sn, Te, Tl, Zn

Chalcophile elements are those that remain on or close to the surface because they combine readily with sulfur and/or some other chalcogen other than oxygen, forming compounds which do not sink into the core.

Chalcophile elements are those metals (sometimes called "poor metals") and heavier nonmetals that have a low affinity for oxygen and prefer to bond with sulfur as highly insoluble sulfides. Chalcophile derives from Greek khalkós (χαλκός), meaning "ore" (it also meant "bronze" or "copper", but in this case "ore" is the relevant meaning), and is taken to mean "chalcogen-loving" by various sources.

Because these sulfides are much denser than the silicate minerals formed by lithophile elements, chalcophile elements separated below the lithophiles at the time of the first crystallisation of the Earth's crust. This has led to their depletion in the Earth's crust relative to their solar abundances, though because the minerals they form are nonmetallic, this depletion has not reached the levels found with siderophile elements.

However, because they formed volatile hydrides on the primitive Earth when the controlling redox reaction was the oxidation or reduction of hydrogen, the less metallic chalcophile elements are strongly depleted on Earth as a whole relative to cosmic abundances. This is most especially true of the chalcogens selenium and tellurium, which for this reason are among the rarest elements found in the Earth's crust (to illustrate, tellurium is only about as abundant as platinum).

The most metallic chalcophile elements (of the copper, zinc and boron groups) may mix to some degree with iron in the Earth's core. They are not likely to be depleted on Earth as a whole relative to their solar abundances since they do not form volatile hydrides. Zinc and gallium are somewhat "lithophile" in nature because they often occur in silicate or related minerals and form quite strong bonds with oxygen. Gallium, notably, is sourced mainly from bauxite, an aluminum hydroxide ore in which gallium ion substitutes for chemically similar aluminum.

Although no chalcophile element is of high abundance in the Earth's crust, chalcophile elements constitute the bulk of commercially important metals. This is because, whereas lithophile elements require energy-intensive electrolysis for extraction, chalcophiles can be easily extracted by reduction with coke, and chalcophiles' geochemical concentration – which in extreme cases can exceed 100,000 times average crustal abundance. These greatest enrichments occur in high plateaux like the Tibetan Plateau and the Bolivian altiplano where large quantities of chalcophile elements have been uplifted through plate collisions. A side-effect of this in modern times is that the rarest chalcophiles (like mercury) are so completely exploited that their value as minerals has almost completely disappeared.