Answer to Question #24289 in Inorganic Chemistry for Abdul rehman

Question

How many elements have discovered in nature? not only on earth crust but the whole nature.

Answer 1

As of November 2011, 118 elements have been identified, the latest being ununseptium in 2010. Of the 118 known elements, only the first 98 are known to occur naturally on Earth; 80 of them are stable, while the others are radioactive, decaying into lighter elements over various timescales from fractions of a second to billions of years. Those elements that do not occur naturally on Earth have been produced artificially as the synthetic products of man-made nuclear reactions.