Evje, Norway/005
Previous | Home | NextDowntown Evje, Norway. This village is important to "Rediscovery" tourists because it is the source of the first scandium mineral found in the world. It was once a busy mining district; now it is a popular tourist area.
This first scandium mineral (thortveitite) at the time was not recognized as containing a new element, but instead was identified as epidote, a complex calcium-aluminum-iron compound. Thortveitite was first recognized from the Iveland area, just south of Evje. The seredipitous discovery of scandium by Nilson was performed on a mixture of processed euxenite (and possibly gadolinite) which yielded not only ytterbium, but the new element scandium as a minor, but unexpected, component. The origin of Nilson's euxenite, however, was Arendal (60 kilometers to the east), whose pegmatite quarries were commercially accessible near the coast (rail transport to Iveland was not available until 1896; scandium was discovered in 1876). The exact location of the quarry which produced Nilson's euxenite is not known. The source of his gadolinite was the Ytterby mine in Sweden.
