21 Facts About Rare-earth elements

Rare-earth elements, called the rare-earth metals or rare-earth oxides or sometimes the lanthanides, are a set of 17 nearly-indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals.

Some rare-earth elements are named after the scientists who discovered them, or elucidated their elemental properties, and some after the geographical locations where discovered.

Exact number of rare-earth elements that existed was highly unclear, and a maximum number of 25 was estimated.

Principal sources of rare-earth elements are the minerals bastnasite, monazite, and loparite and the lateritic ion-adsorption clays.

Today, the rare-earth elements are classified as light or heavy rare-earth elements, rather than in cerium and yttrium groups.

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Alkaline magmas enriched with rare-earth elements include carbonatites, peralkaline granites, and nepheline syenite.

Large carbonatite deposits enriched in rare-earth elements include Mount Weld in Australia, Thor Lake in Canada, Zandkopsdrift in South Africa, and Mountain Pass in the USA.

Rare-earth elements can be enriched in deposits by secondary alteration either by interactions with hydrothermal fluids or meteoric water or by erosion and transport of resistate REE-bearing minerals.

In tropical regions where precipitation is high, weathering forms a thick argillized regolith, this process is called supergene enrichment and produces laterite deposits; heavy rare-earth elements are incorporated into the residual clay by absorption.

The effect of the lanthanide contraction can be observed in the REE behaviour both in a CHARAC-type geochemical system where Rare-earth elements with similar charge and radius should show coherent geochemical behaviour, and in non-CHARAC systems, such as aqueous solutions, where the electron structure is an important parameter to consider as the lanthanide contraction affects the ionic potential.

In geochemistry, rare-earth elements can be used to infer the petrological mechanisms that have affected a rock due to the subtle atomic size differences between the elements, which causes preferential fractionation of some rare earths relative to others depending on the processes at work.

In geochemistry, rare-earth elements are typically presented in normalized "spider" diagrams, in which concentration of rare-earth elements are normalized to a reference standard and are then expressed as the logarithm to the base 10 of the value.

Commonly, the rare-earth elements are normalized to chondritic meteorites, as these are believed to be the closest representation of unfractionated solar system material.

Rare-earth elements patterns observed in igneous rocks are primarily a function of the chemistry of the source where the rock came from, as well as the fractionation history the rock has undergone.

The rare-earth element concentrations are not typically affected by sea and river waters, as rare-earth elements are insoluble and thus have very low concentrations in these fluids.

In oceans, rare-earth elements reflect input from rivers, hydrothermal vents, and aeolian sources; this is important in the investigation of ocean mixing and circulation.

Rare-earth elements are useful for dating rocks, as some radioactive isotopes display long half-lives.

Rare-earth elements are targeting production in late 2023, before ramping up to full capacity in 2024.

Coal and coal by-products are a potential source of critical Rare-earth elements including rare earth Rare-earth elements with estimated amounts in the range of 50 million metric tons.

Additional uses for rare-earth elements are as tracers in medical applications, fertilizers, and in water treatment.

Rare-earth elements could be recovered from industrial wastes with practical potential to reduce environmental and health impacts from mining, waste-generation and imports if known and experimental processes are scaled up.