#ytterby

Island of the Rare Earths

In the 1700s, there was a mine on an island called Resarö, about 15 km north of Sweden’s capital city of Stockholm. At the time, the mine was pulling a type of feldspar out of the ground for making porcelain, useful for stoves and furnaces in Sweden. The mine was named for the local community, the Ytterby mine.

In 1787, a Swedish Army Lieutenant named Carl Axel Arrhenius who had a background in chemistry recognized that there was something odd about one of the dark black rocks at this site. He collected a sample of the rock, named it “ytterbite” since it was discovered at the Ytterby quarry and sent it off to several professors including Johan Gadolin at Åbo University.

Professor Gadolin isolated some components from the rock and realized that he was dealing with an element that had not been previously characterized. He named the compound “Ytterbia” and published its discovery as a newly-characterized element.

However, this rock was more complicated. Half a century later, another scientist named Carl Gustav Mosander worked on the same material and realized that there was more than 1 element t here. He was able to split the ytterbite into 4 different elements at the time, each with slightly different properties.

As this was before the periodic table of elements was created, they had no way of knowing that they were dealing with the Rare Earth Elements – the uppermost of the rows at the very bottom of the periodic table. These elements are very similar in their chemistry – they make the same type of ions and their sizes are only slightly different, so the elements follow each other quite well. The original ytterbite rock collected by Arrhenius was rich in all the rare earth elements; they just had to be isolated.

Eventually those four piles of elements were broken up again and a total of 10 different chemical elements were isolated from this single rock sample. Today, the legacy of this mine is buried within the names on the Periodic Table. Ytterbium comes directly from the name of the mine, and terbium, erbium, and yttrium were all split by Mosander. Gadolinium was later named for professor Gadolin, Holmium is named after Stockholm, and scandium and thulium were named after Scandanavia (Thule).

So, the next time you struggle to pronounce the name of one of the elements at the bottom of the periodic table, pause for a moment and think about Sweden. Our modern society uses those elements heavily in batteries and electronics, so they both made the electronics age possible and made a small part of it a little bit difficult for me to memorize.

-JBB

Image credits: https://flic.kr/p/91kyGh

http://bit.ly/1cwN5Av

Read more: http://bit.ly/1Pvq250

http://www.vanderkrogt.net/elements/rareearths.php

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed078p1343

Ytterby, a small village on the Swedish island of Resarö, is mainly famous for providing names for almost 4% of the periodic table.

At a mine/quarry near the village, the rare earth mineral yttria was discovered and named after the village. This crude mineral eventually proved to be the source of four new elements that were named after the mineral ore and the village. These elements are yttrium (Y), erbium (Er), terbium (Tb), and ytterbium (Yb). In 1989 the ASM International society installed a plaque at the former entrance to the mine, commemorating the mine as a historical landmark.

Tågstopp på Bohusbanan – passagerare evakueras

Det är stopp i tågtrafiken mellan Ytterby och Kode. Det medför förseningar i tågtrafiken på sträckan Göteborg – Uddevalla – Strömstad. Ett västtåg på väg mot Strömstad befinner sig på sträckan. Västtågen och Trafikverket förbereder för att kunna evakuera tåget och ta resenärerna vidare med buss. Tåget ska enligt Trafikverket stå relativt lättillgängligt till vilket underlättar evakueringen.

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