Lithium – 200 Years: Symposium and Field Trip June 14–16, 2018

Lithium was discovered in 1818 in petalite from pegmatites on Utö (Sweden), an island in the Stockholm archipelago, by Johan August Arfwedson (1792–1841), a student working in the laboratory of Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), the famous Swedish chemist. To commemorate the 200th anniversary, the Swedish Mineralogical Society (SMS), with the support of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, organized a symposium held at the museum (Fig. 1) followed by a two-day field trip to Utö Island, where it is still possible to collect petalite and other lithium minerals and to study the geological context of the lithium–cesium–tantalum (LCT) pegmatites in which the lithium minerals occur.