Is chlorine a natural or artificial chemical?

Answer 1

What on earth are "artificial" and "natural" chemicals? For the purposes of answering your question I'll assume that you mean "not commonly found in nature" and "commonly found in nature" respectively.

I'll also assume that by "chlorine" you mean "gaseous elemental chlorine".

It's a bad start when I have to begin answering a question by making not just one but two assumptions, by the way; it indicates you didn't think the question through nearly as much as you should have. There may be no such thing as a stupid question (I personally am not convinced this is true), but there certainly are poor questions.

We don't find chlorine gas around much on Earth, because it's too reactive and there aren't any natural processes that generate it in large quantities (oxygen gas would be rare for the same reason, except that there is a natural process that generates oxygen - photosynthesis). However, there are a few ways it can be generated in small quantities/low concentrations, so I'm a little hesitant to label it "artificial". It is, however, true that if you buy a cylinder of chlorine gas, it didn't come from a chlorine gas spring somewhere.

Answer 2

Chlorine is a naturally occurring chemical element found in nature as a gas or in compounds such as sodium chloride (table salt). However, the chlorine used in water treatment and manufacturing processes is typically produced artificially by electrolysis of salt water or by synthesizing chlorine compounds.