First Fluorine Gas Found In Nature

Abstract

Fluorine gas (F2), which has been called chemistry’s hellcat, is so reactive that chemists have long assumed it does not occur in nature. Now researchers in Munich have evidence that the gas exists naturally, trapped inside a dark purple fluorite mineral called antozonite (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201203515). The discovery resolves a nearly 200-year-old debate about why the mineral, known as “stinkspar” or “fetid fluorite,” smells so bad when it is crushed. Since antozonite was documented in 1816 as making fluorite miners in Bavaria sick to their stomachs, chemists have blamed the stench on several compounds, including I2, Cl2, and ozone. F2 was suspected as the smelly component in 1891 by the French scientist Henri Moissan, who later won the Nobel Prize for isolating the element. But many chemists at the time responded that “it can’t be true,” says Florian Kraus, a fluorine researcher at the Technical University of ...