Kolbeckite

Description

Kolbeckite has a hardness of 3 – 5 and a specific gravity of 2.36. Named in honor of Dr. Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Kolbeck after it was first found in 1926 in Sadisdorf, Dippoldiswalde, Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, Saxony, Germany, Kolbeckite has since been found on most continents in nearly two dozen other locations with two in Utah, three in Arkansas, and one in Wisconsin, but none yet known of within Colorado.

There’s not a whole bunch online about this nearly century-old mineral, and it’s admittedly not a visual stunner, but at roughly 55% Oxygen, 24% Scandium, 18% Phosphorus, and the remainder comprised of Hydrogen, Vanadium, Iron, and Aluminum, this mineral would make a great addition to any Element Collector’s collection!

While Scandium may be only produced by a few mines from a variety of ores with trace amounts, it’s currently listed for sale at nearly $8,000/kg on Luciteria, so, if you were to find something like this, who knows, maybe you could open your own Scandium mine and strike it rich!

There’s more on the Wikipedia page for Scandium that’s worth reading, but included from there, “Scandium is present in most of the deposits of rare-earth and uranium compounds, but it is extracted from these ores in only a few mines worldwide. Because of the low availability and difficulties in the preparation of metallic scandium, which was first done in 1937, applications for scandium were not developed until the 1970s, when the positive effects of scandium on aluminium alloys were discovered. To this day, its use in such alloys remains its only major application. The global trade of scandium oxide is 15–20 tonnes per year. The properties of scandium compounds are intermediate between those of aluminium and yttrium. A diagonal relationship exists between the behavior of magnesium and scandium, just as there is between beryllium and aluminium.”