Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
White phosphorus, yellow phosphorus, or simply tetraphosphorus (P 4) is an allotrope of phosphorus. It is a translucent waxy solid that quickly yellows in light (due to its photochemical conversion into red phosphorus ), [ 2 ] and impure white phosphorus is for this reason called yellow phosphorus.
The Peace River Phosphate Co. began mining in the Winter of 1889, and most of the ore was shipped to Punta Gorda via the Florida Southern, where it was loaded onto ships for export to Europe. Early mining was with pick and shovel where the above-water sand bars were mined by hand. The material was carried on barges to the nearby drying works.
The highest-grade deposits were found where weathering or shallow groundwater had preferentially dissolved away the calcium carbonate. The last mine in Tennessee, which produced phosphate rock from the Bigby-Cannon formation, closed in 1991. The blue phosphate rock was found in the Devonian-age Chattanooga Shale.
For premium support please call: 800-290-4726 more ways to reach us
The Phosphoria Formation of the western United States is a geological formation of Early Permian age. [4] It represents some 15 million years of sedimentation, reaches a thickness of 420 metres (1,380 ft) and covers an area of 350,000 square kilometres (140,000 sq mi).
Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth. It has an occurrence in the Earth's crust of about 0.1%, generally occurring as phosphate in minerals.
White phosphorus smokescreens are fired by the U.S. Army as part of an early morning patrol on Nov. 6, 2004, on the outskirts of Fallujah, Iraq.
A U.S.-led military coalition also deployed white phosphorus weapons in Syria and Iraq in its war against ISIS in 2017, according to HRW. Israel, too, previously used the substance during a 2008 ...