Elements Earth and

Empedocles made no attempt to create a new theory of matter. Instead, he tried to reconcile the thoughts of his various predecessors. He took Thales s theory that everything was made of water and Anaximenes s idea that the primal substance was air, and added two more elements, earth and fire. Empedocles didn t believe that one kind of matter could be transformed into another. Earth couldn t be changed into water, or water into earth, for example. Thus there had to be more than one element. 

In 1667 Becher published another book, Physica Subterranea, in which he expounded a theory that was to profoundly affect chemistry for more than a century. In the book Becher accepted only two of the traditional four elements, earth and water. He then divided earth into three types, so that in effect there were still four elements. He named the three kinds of earth terra lapida, terra pinguis, and terra mercurialis. The second of these, which he described as an oily earth, was supposed to be present in all combustible substances and was released when those substances burned. 

Macquer discusses saline substances in accord with these rules, adopting the view from Becher and Stahl that all saline bodies are composed of elemental earth and elemental water. 

Four elements earth and water (heavy) and fire and air (light)... 

Ytterby, a village in Sweden near Vauxholm) Yttria, which is an earth containing yttrium, was discovered by Gadolin in 1794. Ytterby is the site of a quarry which yielded many unusual minerals containing rare earths and other elements. This small town, near Stockholm, bears the honor of giving names to erbium, terbium, and ytterbium as well as yttrium. 

Barium is a metallic element, soft, and when pure is silvery white like lead it belongs to the alkaline earth group, resembling calcium chemically. The metal oxidizes very easily and should be kept under petroleum or other suitable oxygen-free liquids to exclude air. It is decomposed by water or alcohol. 

Aristotle recognised the importance of water by including it among the four elements along with fire, earth and air. In its many different functions, water is essential to the earth as we know it. Life critically depends on the presence of water. It is the medium of cells and is essential for the structure of proteins, cell membranes and DNA ". It has been estimated that more than 99 % of the molecules in the human body are actually water molecules". ... 

According to one theory earth and the other planets were formed almost 5 billion years ago from the gas (the solar nebula) that trailed behind the sun as It rotated Being remote from the sun s core the matter in the nebula was cooler than that in the in tenor and therefore it contracted accumulating heavier elements and becoming the series of planets that now circle the sun... 

The calculations indicate that the 8 subsheU should fiU at elements 119 and 120, thus making these an alkaH and alkaline earth metal, respectively. Next, the calculations point to the filling, after the addition of a 7t7 electron at element 121 of the inner 5 and (if subsheUs, 32 places in aU, which the author has termed the superactinide elements and which terminates at element 153. This is foUowed by the filling of the 7d subsheU (elements 154 through 162) and 8 subsheU (elements 163 through 168). 

D very weak or inactive many metal, alkaline-earth, and rare-earth element haUdes... 

The lanthanides, distributed widely in low concentrations throughout the earth s cmst (2), are found as mixtures in many massive rock formations, eg, basalts, granites, gneisses, shales, and siUcate rocks, where they are present in quantities of 10—300 ppm. Lanthanides also occur in some 160 discrete minerals, most of them rare, but in which the rare-earth (RE) content, expressed as oxide, can be as high as 60% rare-earth oxide (REO). Lanthanides do not occur in nature in the elemental state and do not occur in minerals as individual elements, but as mixtures. 

Table 1. Rare Earths and Other Elements in the Earth s Crust...

Comparing the relative abundance of the rare earths and the other elements Hsted in Table 1, the rare earths are not so rare. Cerium, the most abundant of the rare-earth elements is roughly as abundant as tin thuHum, the least abundant, is more common than cadmium or silver. Over 200... 

Mona.Zlte, The commercial digestion process for m on a site uses caustic soda. The phosphate content of the ore is recovered as marketable trisodium phosphate and the rare earths as RE hydroxide (10). The usual industrial practice is to attack finely ground m on a site using a 50% sodium hydroxide solution at 150°C or a 70% sodium hydroxide solution at 180°C. The resultant mixed rare-earth and thorium hydroxide cake is dissolved in hydrochloric or nitric acid, then processed to remove thorium and other nonrare-earth elements, and processed to recover the individual rare earths (see... 

Liquid—Liquid Extraction. The tiquid—tiquid extraction process for the rare-earth separation was discovered by Fischer (14). Extraction of REE using an alcohol, ether, or ketone gives separation factors of up to 1.5. The selectivity of the distribution of two rare-earth elements, REI and RE2, between two nonmiscible tiquid phases is given by the ratio of the distribution coefficients DI and D2 ... 

Chlorine. Chlorine, the material used to make PVC, is the 20th most common element on earth, found virtually everywhere, in rocks, oceans, plants, animals, and human bodies. It is also essential to human life. Eree chlorine is produced geothermally within the earth, and occasionally finds its way to the earth s surface in its elemental state. More usually, however, it reacts with water vapor to form hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid reacts quickly with other elements and compounds, forming stable compounds (usually chloride) such as sodium chloride (common salt), magnesium chloride, and potassium chloride, all found in large quantities in seawater. 

A simplified diagram representing the various reservoirs and transport mechanisms and pathways involved in the cycles of nutrient elements at and above the surface of the Earth is given in Eigure 1. The processes are those considered to be the most important in the context of this article, but others of lesser significance can be postulated. Eor some of the elements, notably carbon, sulfur, chlorine, and nitrogen, considerable research has been done to evaluate (quantitatively) the amount of the various elements in the reservoirs and the rates of transfer. 

Arsenic is widely distributed about the earth and has a terrestrial abundance of approximately 5 g/t (4). Over 150 arsenic-bearing minerals are known (1). Table 2 fists the most common minerals. The most important commercial source of arsenic, however, is as a by-product from the treatment of copper, lead, cobalt, and gold ores. The quantity of arsenic usually associated with lead and copper ores may range from a trace to 2 —3%, whereas the gold ores found in Sweden contain 7—11% arsenic. Small quantities of elemental arsenic have been found in a number of localities. 

Cobalt is the thirtieth most abundant element on earth and comprises approximately 0.0025% of the earth s cmst (3). It occurs in mineral form as arsenides, sulfides, and oxides trace amounts are also found in other minerals of nickel and iron as substitute ions (4). Cobalt minerals are commonly associated with ores of nickel, iron, silver, bismuth, copper, manganese, antimony, and 2iac. Table 1 Hsts the principal cobalt minerals and some corresponding properties. A complete listing of cobalt minerals is given ia Reference 4. 

The chemical identities of the fission products determine their subsequent redistribution, those elements which are in the gaseous state at the temperature of the operation migrating to the cooler exterior of the fuel rods, and die less voltile elements undergoing incorporation in the fuel rod in solid solution. Thus caesium and iodine migrate to the gas fill which sunounds the fuel rod, and elements such as the rare earths and zirconium are accommodated in solid solution in UO2 without significant migration along the fuel rod radius. Strontium and barium oxidize to form separate islands which can be seen under the microscope. 

This book presents a unified treatment of the chemistry of the elements. At present 112 elements are known, though not all occur in nature of the 92 elements from hydrogen to uranium all except technetium and promethium are found on earth and technetium has been detected in some stars. To these elements a further 20 have been added by artificial nuclear syntheses in the laboratory. Why are there only 90 elements in nature Why do they have their observed abundances and why do their individual isotopes occur with the particular relative abundances observed Indeed, we must also ask to what extent these isotopic abundances commonly vary in nature, thus causing variability in atomic weights and possibly jeopardizing the classical means of determining chemical composition and structure by chemical analysis. 

Phosphorus is the eleventh element in order of abundance in crustal rocks of the earth and it occurs there to the extent of 1120 ppm (cf. H 1520 ppm, Mn 1060 ppm). All its known terrestrial minerals are orthophosphates though the reduced phosphide mineral schrieber-site (Fe,Ni)3P occurs in most iron meteorites. Some 200 crystalline phosphate minerals have been described, but by far the major amount of P occurs in a single mineral family, the apatites, and these are the only ones of industrial importance, the others being rare curiosities. Apatites (p. 523) have the idealized general formula 3Ca3(P04)2.CaX2, that is Caio(P04)6X2, and common members are fluorapatite Ca5(P04)3p, chloroapatite Ca5(P04)3Cl, and hydroxyapatite Ca5(P04)3(0H). In addition, there are vast deposits of amorphous phosphate rock, phosphorite, which approximates in composition to fluoroapatite. " These deposits are widely... 

In 1751 the Swedish mineralogist, A. F. Cronstedt, discovered a heavy mineral from which in 1803 M. H. Klaproth in Germany and, independently, i. i. Berzelius and W. Hisinger in Sweden, isolated what was thought to be a new oxide (or earth ) which was named ceria after the recently discovered asteroid, Ceres. Between 1839 and 1843 this earth, and the previously isolated yttria (p. 944), were shown by the Swedish surgeon C. G. Mosander to be mixtures from which, by 1907, the oxides of Sc, Y, La and the thirteen lanthanides other than Pm were to be isolated. The small village of Ytterby near Stockholm is celebrated in the names of no less than four of these elements (Table 30.1). 

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