page_title: Nickel
section_title: Occurrence
hierarchical_section_title: Nickel / Properties / Occurrence
caption_attribution_description: English: Acid-etched iron meteorite slice, revealing the characteristic Widmanstatten pattern, indicative of slow cooling and crystallization within the iron-nickel cores of larger asteroids. Note the "vug" inclusion on the middle left of the slice. From the California Polytechnic State University Physics Department meteorite collection, presented at the April 2009 meeting of the Central Coast Astronomical Society. Photo by Cuesta College Physical Sciences Division instructor Dr. Patrick M. Len.
context_page_description: Nickel is a chemical element with the symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile. Pure nickel, powdered to maximize the reactive surface area, shows a significant chemical activity, but larger pieces are slow to react with air under standard conditions because an oxide layer forms on the surface and prevents further corrosion. Even so, pure native nickel is found in Earth's crust only in tiny amounts, usually in ultramafic rocks, and in the interiors of larger nickel–iron meteorites that were not exposed to oxygen when outside Earth's atmosphere.
  Meteoric nickel is found in combination with iron, a reflection of the origin of those elements as major end products of supernova nucleosynthesis. An iron–nickel mixture is thought to compose Earth's outer and inner cores.
  Use of nickel has been traced as far back as 3500 BCE. Nickel was first isolated and classified as a chemical element in 1751 by Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who initially mistook the ore for a copper mineral, in the cobalt mines of Los, Hälsingland, Sweden.
context_section_description: On Earth, nickel occurs most often in combination with sulfur and iron in pentlandite, with sulfur in millerite, with arsenic in the mineral nickeline, and with arsenic and sulfur in nickel galena. Nickel is commonly found in iron meteorites as the alloys kamacite and taenite. The presence of nickel in meteorites was first detected in 1799 by Joseph-Louis Proust, a French chemist who then worked in Spain. Proust analyzed samples of the meteorite from Campo del Cielo (Argentina), which had been obtained in 1783 by Miguel Rubín de Celis, discovering the presence in them of nickel (about 10%) along with iron.
  The bulk of the nickel is mined from two types of ore deposits. The first is laterite, where the principal ore mineral mixtures are nickeliferous limonite, (Fe,Ni)O(OH), and garnierite (a mixture of various hydrous nickel and nickel-rich silicates). The second is magmatic sulfide deposits, where the principal ore mineral is pentlandite: (Ni,Fe)
  ₉S
  ₈.
  Indonesia and Australia have the biggest estimated reserves, at 46% of world's total.
  Identified land-based resources throughout the world averaging 1% nickel or greater comprise at least 130 million tons of nickel (about the double of known reserves). About 60% is in laterites and 40% in sulfide deposits.
  On geophysical evidence, most of the nickel on Earth is believed to be in the Earth's outer and inner cores. Kamacite and taenite are naturally occurring alloys of iron and nickel. For kamacite, the alloy is usually in the proportion of 90:10 to 95:5, although impurities (such as cobalt or carbon) may be present, while for taenite the nickel content is between 20% and 65%. Kamacite and taenite are also found in nickel iron meteorites.
caption: Widmanstätten pattern showing the two forms of nickel-iron, kamacite and taenite, in an octahedrite meteorite
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