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Lost and Found: A natural resource resurfaces

Posted May 12, 2008

“It’s a metal that, like other natural resources, has been around a long time. People thought it was some sort of lead compound. It was, however, officially “discovered” by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778.” — Chris Mayer

by Chris Mayer

Baltimore – (TFN): The highest natural arch in the world is 25 miles southwest of Kashi, Xinjiang, China. It’s made of sandstone and nearly 1,200 feet tall. Eric Shipton (1907-1977), the famed British mountain climber, “discovered” the arch in 1947.

Of course, he really didn’t “discover” it in the usual sense. Local Chinese had known about the arch for hundreds of years. It just escaped Western notice until Shipton’s arrival. Shipton had a long resume of climbing mountains all over the world, from Mount Kenya to India’s Kamet. In his book Mountains of Tartary, though, he got the location of the arch mixed up. So when a team from the Guinness Book of World Records set out years later to verify the existence of the arch, they couldn’t find it. So the arch was “lost” again.

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It wasn’t until 2000 that a National Geographic team found it again. As National Geographic Adventure reports: “It beggars belief that a significant wonder of the world could remain missing in an age of satellite imagery, but there it is.” So we discovered the arch, lost it and discovered it again. Of course, it hadn’t moved all the while.

And that gets us to element 42. It’s called molybdenum, or “moly” for short (pronounced “molly”). It’s a metal that, like other natural resources, has been around a long time. People thought it was some sort of lead compound. It was, however, officially “discovered” by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778. Even then, it took a while before we figured out what to do with it. So essentially, moly was lost yet again. Read on to learn more.

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