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The rare-earth elements (REE), also called the rare-earth metals or rare earths, and sometimes the lanthanides or lanthanoids (although scandium and yttrium, which do not belong to this series, are usually included as rare earths), [1] are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals. Compounds containing rare ...
Rare-earth ore, shown with a United States penny for size comparison. A rare-earth mineral contains one or more rare-earth elements as major metal constituents. Rare-earth minerals are usually found in association with alkaline to peralkaline igneous complexes in pegmatites. This would be associated with alkaline magmas or with carbonatite ...
Although it is classified as a rare earth element, lanthanum is the 28th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, almost three times as abundant as lead. In minerals such as monazite and bastnäsite, lanthanum composes about a quarter of the lanthanide content. [10]
Yttrium is almost always found in combination with lanthanide elements in rare-earth minerals and is never found in nature as a free element. 89 Y is the only stable isotope and the only isotope found in the Earth's crust .
It is the sixth-most abundant rare-earth element and fourth-most abundant lanthanide, making up 9.1 parts per million of the Earth's crust, an abundance similar to that of boron. In 1841, Swedish chemist Carl Gustav Mosander extracted a rare-earth oxide residue he called didymium from a residue he called "lanthana", in turn separated from ...
Neodymium is a fairly common element in the Earth's crust for being a rare-earth metal. Most rare-earth metals are less abundant. Neodymium is classified as a lithophile under the Goldschmidt classification, meaning that it is generally found combined with oxygen. Although it belongs to the rare-earth metals, neodymium is not rare at all.
Four decades ago, a rare earth processing plant on France's Atlantic coast was one of the largest in the world, churning out materials used to make colour televisions, arc lights and camera lenses.
Another way to classify incompatible elements is by mass (lanthanide series): light rare-earth elements (LREE) are La, Ce, Pr, Nd, and Sm, and heavy rare-earth elements (HREE) are Eu–Lu. Rocks or magmas that are rich, or only slightly depleted, in light rare-earth elements are referred to as "fertile", and those with strong depletions in LREE ...