RADIUM IN DEVON?

Evening Star, Issue 22688, 30 June 1937, Page 13

RADIUM IN DEVON?

A OWN. SERVANT'S FIND The red cliffs of Budleigh Salterton. Devon, may provide a new source of radium, said the ‘ Morning Post ’ on May 5. White nodules, suggestive in appear* ance of a fungoid growth, which hav* been found in the cliffs by Mr G. E. L, Carter, a retired Indian Civil servant, have been pronounced by the Crystallo* graphy Laboratory, Cambridge, to con. tain uranium. This is the parent substance of all radio-active materials of the rdium family. Owing to the fact that radium i* naturally formed by the breakdown of uranium, the normal supposition is that any rock which contains uranium a!sq contains radium. These new radio-active nodules wer* exhibited for the first time at a conversazione held by the Royal Society a| Burlington House, London, recently. They are believed to date from th* time when dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters werf reaching the end of their supremacy on earth. The presence of another rare chemical element, vanadium, in the nodule* may, it is suggested, be connected with the power possessed by certain primitive fish to concentrate this element in their bodies. Since vanadium has * chemical attraction for uranium, thi* theory would also account for th« radio-active quality of the nodules. ■ The reason lhat the nodules hav* not before been discovered is, it is suggested, that the base of the cliff at this point—for some distance west of Budleigh Salterbon—is unusually difficult walking. Even the Geological Survey, it is understood, has been content to examine this stretch of cliff from the top. There had been no previous reason to suspect that there wa* anything unusual about it.