It smells a bit like gasoline, doesn’t it? | NASA via Unsplash
Do you see the helium? That weird gas that makes balloons float, makes high-pitched voices sound and, by the way, is used in certain nuclear reactors? Well, it’s rarer than you thought, for the simple reason that it’s the only completely non-renewable element on our planet, which makes it increasingly difficult to obtain.
To fill our cylinders with it, we have to extract it from natural deposits that form very slowly and rise from the Earth’s interior before diffusing into the atmosphere.
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But as futurism tells us, we don’t really know how much helium we have left, and scientists wonder why it hasn’t already disappeared from our planet.
The prevailing theory among experts is this: there would be gigantic reserves hidden in the Earth’s core that would slowly escape, for example when a large helium balloon loses air.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
A team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts examined samples from lava fields on Canada’s Baffin Island and in Iceland.
The researchers found that all contained similar concentrations of helium isotopes, suggesting the chemical element came from a single source from Canada to Iceland.
Also read: Helium 3 is the ideal fuel for a clean future and is ten times more abundant on Earth than expected
In an article published in the journal Nature, the researchers specify their conclusions: The presence of other noble gases (such as neon) in the samples taken is consistent with the conditions…
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