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Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. It is a silvery white, soft, non-magnetic, and ductile metal in the boron group. By weight, aluminium makes up about 8% of the earth’s crust, where it is the third most abundant element (after oxygen and silicon) and also the most abundant metal. However, in the lower part of the Earth’s mantle, the appearance of aluminium decreases. The main aluminium ore is bauxite. Metallic aluminium is highly reactive, such that native specimens are rare and limited exclusively to a reducing environment. Instead, it is found combined in 270 different minerals.

Aluminium is characterized by its low density and the ability to resist corrosion by the phenomenon of passivation. Aluminium and its alloys are vital to the aerospace industry and are important in the transportation and construction industries such as building facades and window frames. Oxides and sulfates are the most useful aluminium compounds.

Despite its distribution in the environment, no known life form uses metabolically aluminium salts, but aluminium is well tolerated by plants and animals. Due to the abundance of these salts, the possibility of their biological role is of constant interest to them, and research continues.

Of the aluminium isotopes, only 27 Al is stable. This corresponds to aluminium with an odd atomic number. This is the only primordial isotope of aluminium; the only one that has existed on Earth in its present form since the creation of the planet. Almost all of the aluminium on Earth is present as this isotope, which makes it a mononuclidic element and means that its standard atomic weight is the same as that of the isotope. The standard atomic weight of aluminium is low as compared to many other metals, which affects the properties of the element. This makes aluminium very useful for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), since its only stable isotope which has a high sensitivity to NMR.

All other aluminium isotopes are radioactive. The most stable of these is 26Al: although it was present along with stable 27Al in the interstellar medium from which the solar system formed, also produced by stellar nucleosynthesis, its half-life is only 717,000 years, and therefore, it cannot survive after formation of the planet. However, the smallest traces of 26Al are formed from argon in the atmosphere as a result of scattering of cosmic rays by protons. The 26Al to 10Be ratio has been used for radio radiodating of geological processes over a period of 105 to 106 year time scales, in particular transport, deposition, sedimentation storage, burial time and erosion. Most meteorite scientists believe that the energy released by the decay of 26Al was responsible for the melting and differentiation of some asteroids after their formation 4.55 billion years ago.

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