Ramsay minerals

Gr. helios, the sun). Janssen obtained the first evidence of helium during the solar eclipse of 1868 when he detected a new line in the solar spectrum. Lockyer and Frankland suggested the name helium for the new element. In 1895 Ramsay discovered helium in the uranium mineral clevite while it was independently discovered in cleveite by the Swedish chemists Cleve and Langlet at about the same time. Rutherford and Royds in 1907 demonstrated that alpha particles are helium nuclei. 

Gr. xenon, stranger) Discovered by Ramsay and Travers in 1898 in the residue left after evaporating liquid air components. Xenon is a member of the so-called noble or "inert" gases. It is present in the atmosphere to the extent of about one part in twenty million. Xenon is present in the Martian atmosphere to the extent of 0.08 ppm. the element is found in the gases evolved from certain mineral springs, and is commercially obtained by extraction from liquid air. 

In 1895 Ramsay also identified helium as the gas previously found occluded in uranium minerals and mistakenly reported as nitrogen. Five years later he and Travers isolated helium from samples of atmospheric neon. 

In 1894, the Scottish chemist William Ramsay removed nitrogen and oxygen from air through chemical reactions. From the residue, Ramsay Isolated argon, the first noble gas to be discovered. A year after discovering argon, Ramsay obtained an unreactive gas from uranium-containing mineral samples. The gas exhibited the same spectral lines that had been observed in the solar eclipse of 1868. After helium was shown to exist on Earth, this new element was studied and characterized. 

Were all of these newly discovered substances also new elements This question would not be answered for some years but there was a flurry of other major discoveries to keep the protagonists occupied. Pierre Curie discovered that radioactivity released large quantities of heat (Curie and Laborde 1903) which appeared mysterious—as if the heat was coming from nowhere. This discovery provided an extra heat source for the Earth and reconciled the estimates of a very old Earth, based on geological estimates, with the young age calculated by Lord Kelvin from cooling rates. The year 1903 also witnessed the first demonstration that a-decay released He (Ramsay and Soddy 1903). The build up of He was soon put to use to date geological materials, initially by Rutherford in 1905 who calculated the first ever radiometric age of 500 Myr for a pitchblende sample, and then by Strutt who examined a wide variety of minerals (Strutt... 

It had been observed already that the radioactive minerals on heating give off Helium — a gaseous element, characterised by a particular yellow line in its spectium — and it seemed not unlikely that helium might be the ultimate decomposition product of the emanation. A research to settle this point was undertaken by Sir William Ramsay and Mr. Soddy, and a preliminary experiment having confirmed the above speculation, they carried out further very careful experiments. "The maximum amount of the emanation obtained from 50 milligrams of radium bromide was conveyed by means of oxygen into a U-tube cooled in liquid air, and the latter was then extracted by the pump." The spectrum... 

Neon was discovered by Ramsay and Travers in 1898.1ts name comes from the Greek word neos, which means new. It is present in the atmosphere at a concentration of 0.00182% by volume (dry atmosphere). This element also is found in stars and interstellar gas clouds. Earth s earliest crust probably contained neon occluded in minerals. The gas later escaped into the atmosphere. 

In the meantime Per Theodor Cleve, tire Swedish chemist for whom the mineral cleveite had been named by its discoverer, A. E. Nordenskiold, had his student Nils Abraham Langlet investigate it (53). Although Ramsay announced the discovery before Cleve and Langlet had completed their research, the Swedish chemists were independent discoverers of helium. Langlet s first helium was purer, in fact, than Ramsay s, for he obtained a much better value for its atomic weight (13, 31, 32). The spectroscopic measurements were made by Professor Robeit Thaten (47). 

The thorium series is apparently independent of the three just named. In 1905 Otto Hahn, working under Sir William Ramsay s direction, discovered radiothorium in the residues from a Ceylon mineral called thorianite, and two years later he showed that mesothorium is an intermediate disintegration product (19, 35, 36). 

Figure 5.5 Distribution of mineral elements within potato tubers. Data show longitudinal profiles of elements from the distal (Segment 1) to the stem end (Segment 5) of tubers from Stirling plants (N. Subramanian, G. Ramsay, M. R. Broadley and P.J. White, unpublished data).

The lightest noble gas, helium, had in fact been discovered in 1868 -but only on the sun (see pages 73-4). So little was known about it that Mendeleyev could see no way to include it. Helium was not found on Earth until 1895, when William Ramsay and Morris Travers in London isolated it from uranium minerals. Two Swedish chemists in Uppsala found it in much the same source at the same time. 

Interest in the subject was revived in 1907 by Ramsay s 7 announcement of the development of spectroscopic quantities of lithium in solutions of cupric sulphate or nitrate exposed to the radium emanation. In control experiments made without the emanation no lithium was detected. ilme. Curie and Mile. Gleditsch8 repeated Ramsay s experiments, employing vessels of platinum instead of glass, but failed to detect the development of even a trace of lithium. They attribute Ramsay s results to solution of lithium present in the glass of his apparatus. Mile. Gleditsch9 detected the presence of lithium in a sample of pitchblende from Joachimsthal, as well as in other radioactive minerals, but failed to find any simple relationship between the proportion of lithium and copper present in the minerals examined. The results10 are summarized in the table ... 

Ramsay, J. A., Li, H., Brown, R. S. Ramsay, B. A. (2003). Naphthalene and anthracene mineralization linked to oxygen, nitrate, Fe(III) and sulphate reduction in a mixed microbial population. Biodegradation, 14, 321-9. 

The element helium, from Greek helios, the sun, had already been noted in the Sun s spectrum in 1868, but was not isolated as a terrestrial element until 1895, when Ramsay obtained it by heating the mineral uraninite in which the helium was physically trapped. With an improved technique of liquid air distillation, Ramsay and Travers isolated neon (Greek, neos, new), krypton (Greek, kryptos, hidden), and xenon (Greek,... 

Ramsay W. R. H., Crawford A. J., and Foden J. D. (1984) Field setting, mineralogy, chemistry and genesis of arc picrites. New Georgia, Solomon Islands. Contrib. Mineral Petrol 88, 386-402. 

Helium on Earth For the next 30 years, chemists looked for helium on Earth. Then, in 1895, the English physicist Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916) found helium in a mineral of the element uranium. Credit for the earthly discovery of helium is sometimes given to two other scientists also. Swedish chemists Per Teodor Cleve (1840-1905) and Nils Abraham Langlet also discovered helium at about the same time in a mineral called cleveite. 

The adsorption of radionuclides to sediments is strongly affected by particle size and mineralogy (Aston, Assinder Kelly, 1985 Ramsay Raw, 1987 Livens Baxter, 1988a). In particular, fine grained material accumulates higher concentrations of all radionuclides and the presence of clay minerals also enhances adsorption. 

In 1868 the French physicist Pierre Janssen detected a new dark line in the solar emission spectrum that did not match the emission lines of known elements. The name helium (from the Greek helios, meaning the sun) was given to the element responsible for the absorption line. Twenty-seven years later, helium was discovered on Earth by the British chemist William Ramsay in a mineral of uranium. On Earth, the only source of helium is through radioactive decay processes—a particles emitted during nuclear decay are eventually converted to helium atoms. 

---