The small village Ytterby, which gives its name to the elements yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium is near to which capital city?

A number of elements were discovered at a mine outside Stockholm: Ytterby gruva (gruva = mine). The mine was named after the nearby village, located on the island Resarö in the Stockholm archipelago. Ytterby gruva opened in the 1600s to extract quartz for iron production. In the 1700s and 1800s, Ytterby was mined for feldspar, which was used by the glass and porcelain industries.

In 1789, Carl Axel Arrhenius found an unusually heavy black rock in debris near the mine. He gave the rock and other samples to Johan Gadolin for analysis. Gadolin isolated a new “earth”, metal oxide from the rock that he called ytterbia (later shorted to yttria). This was the first known rare earth metal compound. The black rock found by Arrhenius was actually a mineral that was later named in Gadolin's honor, gadolinite. Gadolinium Gd (atomic number 64) is obtained from this mineral.

After more than a century of research, a number of new elements were discovered in rocks from Ytterby. The names of four elements derive directly from the village’s name: yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium.

Other rare earth elements found at Ytterby Gruva are holmium, named after Stockholm; thulium, which was named after Thule, an ancient word that refers to the region of Scandinavia; and scandium, named after Scandinavia. The transition metal, tantalum (named after a Greek mythological figure who was famous for his eternal punishment in Tartarus) was also discovered in Ytterby rocks.