This element is sponsored by Dr. Paul Charlesworth, Assistant professor of Chemistry and Chemical Education Michigan Technological University.
Carbon is unique among the elements in the vast number and variety of compounds it can form.
There are close to ten million known carbon compounds, including carbon dioxide, coal, oil, and natural gas. Carbon is the basis of all known life, forming thousands of organic compounds essential to life processes. Carbon has seven isotopes, and in 1961 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry adopted carbon-12 as the basis for atomic weights.