Carbon and its Uses

Carbon has many uses, the following are some of them

Why is carbon so important?

Carbon is one of the world's most abundent elements, if you could imagine our lives without food, plastics, natural gas, petroleum etc then you would be half way on to understanding how important carbon is. In fact if it were not for carbon life itself would not be possible. Processes like respiration would not be possible, in fact the building blocks for the life (DNA) even contain carbon.

fuel (coal)

(Coal)

lubricant (graphite)

(picture of graphite)

C-14 isotope used in archaeological dating

(Archeological dating)

carbon compounds are important in many facets of the chemical industry

(Chemical Plant)

Next time your family goes to a barbecue, you'll know that the main ingredient of the charcoal is carbon. Carbon stores lots of energy and is good at holding onto heat. That's why it's used for heat and cooking.

Do you know that diamond is one big chunk of carbon? If carbon is left in a very high pressure area for a long time, all of the carbon atoms are pushed together to form a crystal. That crystal is called a diamond. We use diamond for rings and other things like that.

Let's do some simple thinking here. Oil is made from dead plants. Plastic is made from oil. All plastics are mainly carbon based as well.

Carbon is most important element that all plants have. Without carbon, plants would not and can not exist. Since every animal is based on plats, every animal on Earth also needs carbon to survive as well. As us humans, and other animals, are not designed to eat raw carbon, it needs to be in plants before humans can do anything with it. It's simple. No carbon, no life. Period. End of story

Also, the black stuff you write with in your pencil is made of carbon. It is a special type of carbon called graphite.