Group 2 Infographic

The second of a series of infographics on the groups of the periodic table, here some general properties of the group 2 elements are examined. As stated previously, these are primarily aimed at secondary school students, hence the relative simplicity and generality of the information presented.

If you want to download this infographic for your own use, you can get a high res pdf file here. The previous infographic on the group 1 elements is also available to download for free.

Creative Commons Licence
The graphic in this article is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. See the site’s content usage guidelines.

3 CommentsClose Comments

3 Comments

  • James Kennedy
    Posted December 24, 2013 at 5:30 am 0Likes

    This infographic demonstrates quite well (on the left hand side) that melting points have nothing to do with mass. (A lot of students think they’re directly related!) It’s actually the combined strength of the intermolecular bonds that determines melting points (and boiling points).

    Good work and thank you for sharing all of this for free!

    • Posted December 24, 2013 at 12:26 pm 0Likes

      Thanks!

      I’ve actually struggled to find a good coherent explanation for the melting points of the group two elements. Obviously magnesium’s melting point is lower than would be expected looking at the general trend down the group, and I’ve heard this explained as being due to the crystal structures – up to magnesium, the metals are hexagonal close packed, whereas Ca and Sr are face centred cubic and Ba is body centred cubic. However, in other quarters, I’ve seen this explanation debunked, pointing to the fact that the packing is still 12 co-ordinate in both Be/Mg and Ca/Sr, despite the different packing arrangements, so any differences should be minor and probably wouldn’t account for the low melting point.

      Anyway, I digress 🙂 If you do manage to stumble across a good explanation please let me know!

  • Trackback: Groups of the Periodic Table | Pearltrees

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this: