Why is element mercury so expensive?
Mercury’s actually remarkably cheap. The current cost of mercury is about $550 per flask (note that this is the bulk price, not what you’d pay if you wanted a small amount of mercury). A flask is an archaic unit of measuring mercury that weighs 76 pounds. This works out to about $7.24 per pound of mercury. I have seen mercury for sale in small quantities at less than $40 per pound, if you want to get a sense of the “retail” price. The average abundance of mercury in the Earth’s crust is approximately 0.08 parts per million, which is very small. To put this in perspective, silver also comprises about 0.08ppm of the Earth’s crust. But silver costs about $260 per pound. So why is mercury comparatively cheap? There’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, mercury isn’t chemically compatible with the common rock-forming minerals, so it tends to segregate out from other minerals when magma hardens or a rock is hydrothermally altered. The result is a highly concentrated deposit of mercury. Because mer
