This is Outside In, a show about the natural world and how we use it.

I'm Sam Evans Brown, and this is producer Taylor Quimby.

You only have to count to three on the periodic table of the elements before you get to lithium.

Hydrogen, helium, lithium.

It's the lightest metal in the world, light enough to float, soft enough to cut with a butter knife, a silvery white that's almost luminous until it's exposed to air.

With a single electron in its outer shell, an atom of lithium is also highly unstable.

It wants to react to just about everything around it.

So you won't find pure lithium in nature.

It's always in disguise, dissolved in a saltwater solution, or locked up in a crystal.

There's no lithium nuggets. There's no mines where you just go underground and hack out chunks of lithium

ready to go.

That's not that's not how works. This is Emily Hersch, the self-styled first lady of lithium.

She's a consultant who's worked in oil and gas and even gold. That idea of pure lithium as a chunk of metal only exists in specific

laboratory conditions. Pure lithium metal has to be kept in certain conditions so it doesn't react to air or water.

Because it'll burn.

Or it'll catch on fire.

Which didn't stop me from ordering some off of Amazon.com just to see it for myself.

Look at this. Yes, you can buy pure lithium on Amazon.

It came in a tiny glass vial filled with mineral oil.

I poured it into a metal pot full of cold water with my son.

The lithium sizzled like garlic in oil, bubbled and steamed until there was nothing left to see.

You can find more dramatic reactions on YouTube.

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