 Discovery Information
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| Who: Paul emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran |
| When: 1886 |
| Where: France |
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| Name Origin
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| Greek: dysprositos (hard to get at). |
| "Dysprosium" in different languages. |
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| Sources
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| Dysprosium is never encountered as the free element. Usually found with erbium, holmium and other rare earths in some minerals (euxenite ((Y,Ca,Ce,U,Th)(Nb,Ta,Ti)2O6), fergusonite ((Ce,La,Nd)NbO4), gadolinite ((Ce,La,Nd,Y)2FeBe2Si2O10) and xenotime to name a few).
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| Around 100 tons are produced annually. Primary mining occurs in the USA, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia.
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| Abundance
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| Universe: 0.002 ppm (by weight) |
| Sun: 0.002 ppm (by weight) |
| Carbonaceous meteorite: 0.28 ppm |
| Earth's Crust: 6 ppm |
| Seawater: |
| Atlantic surface: 8 x 10-7 ppm
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| Atlantic deep: 9.6 x 10-7 ppm
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| Pacific surface: n/a ppm |
| Pacific deep: n/a ppm |
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| Uses
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| Dysprosium is used for manufacturing compact discs, and in conjunction with vanadium and other elements is used in making laser materials.
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| As control-rods for nuclear reactors because it readily absorbs neutrons.
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| History
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| Dysprosium was first identified in Paris in 1886 by French chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran. However, the element itself was not isolated in relatively pure form until after the development of ion exchange and metallographic reduction techniques in the 1950s. The name dysprosium is derived from the Greek "dysprositos";
"hard to obtain". Part of the difficulty lay in dysprosium being especially close in its behavior to the far more abundant
yttrium, during many of the separation technologies that were used in the 19th century. This overshadowed the fact that dysprosium
was the most abundant of the heavy lanthanoids.
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| Notes
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| It is soft enough to be cut with a knife, and can be machined without sparking if overheating is avoided. Dysprosium's characteristics
can be greatly affected even by small amounts of impurities.
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| It wasn't until the 1950s that the element was isolated in a relatively pure form. Dysprosium does not have any known biological
properties.
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| Hazards
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| As with the other lanthanoids, dysprosium compounds are of low to moderate toxicity, although their toxicity has not been investigated in detail.
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