When I was on a hunt for strange and wonderful science to write about today, the googles told me that seven elements were discovered in this one mine in Sweden. I just found out about this today, and I’m a chemist. This made my head hurt.
It helps that they were only just figuring out what an element was.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Ytterby Mine.
For a while, humans have dumbed hard. We were pretty convinced that everything was made of earth, wind, water, and fire until just a few hundred years ago. Phlogiston theory reigned supreme to explain why fire was a thing. This only ended when a French tax collector named Antoine Lavoisier came along in the late 1780s, figured out stoichiometry, and got the ball rolling on the concepts behind like a third of your high school chemistry book.
Alas, he was a French tax collector in the 1780s.
They guillotined the fuck outta that guy.
I’m not sure if the stoichiometry had much to do with it, but if you were ever really pissed about your chem homework… you’re welcome?
What I’m saying is that we weren’t, as a whole species, good at chemistry in 1787 when Carl Axel Arrhenius was a thirty year old officer in the Swedish Army working as a part time chemist.
He found a sample of a black stone outside the Ytterby Mine that looked unusual. He sent the sample to Professor Johan Gandolin for analysis.
Gandolin, through careful experimentation, recognized that there was a ‘new kind of earth’ in this. Indeed, the mine at Ytterby had not one, but a list of new types of earth. Ytterbium, yttrium, terbium, and erbium were all rare earth elements, newly discovered for the first time and named for the town. Thulium, scandium, holmium, and gadolinium were also discovered in the same mine.
Eight elements, one mine.
How the fuck?
By that point, we’d identified a lot of substances we now define as elements, but the concept of the element was undergoing a makeover. The old world alchemy being supplanted by Lavoisier’s primitive periodic table. This new concept of an element was hung on a framework that we’d recognize with our modern understanding of the atom. Things like carbon, sulfur, mercury, lead, and aluminum were in the earliest attempts at periodic tables. We hadn’t gotten to things like the rare earth elements.
Arrhenius just happened to be in the right mine at the right time to discover a buttload of elements. Someone perhaps unknowingly stumbled on these rare earth elements in mineral form before he did, and maybe even in different places on the planet.
It’s not that the rare earth elements are particularly rare. Gandolin named them because the black rocks seemed rare at the time and ‘earth’ was just the going term in the 18th century. The rare earth elements are mined from the planet by the ton each year now for various industrial purposes, making it an inaccurate name with staying power.
The Ytterby Mines have been closed since the 1990s, the town the reigning undisputed champion of ‘fill-in-the-periodic-table’ bingo.
This has been your daily Moment of science, still not sure how I’ve been a chemist for this many years and I just found this out today.
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“Ytterbium, yttrium, terbium, and erbium … Thulium, scandium, holmium, and gadolinium …
Seven elements …”
Is this a hidden contest? Did I win a prize?
I wrote seven while reading from one article and then added in another element after reading another and forgot to update.
It’s been a little hard to nail down the number of elements first found and identified in the mine. I’ve seen one website list 11, some only list the four named after the place, several websites list 7, some list 8. Ugh. Updating the article, thank you for the catch.