Ethan Siegel, Contributor
A helium extraction facility in Amarillo, TX. Image credit: Jennifer Tutop, BLM New Mexico Intern, under a c.c.-by-2.0 license.
In a huge announcement this week, scientists gathered together from a number of different universities and research facilities to hail the discovery of a giant underground deposit of helium. In Tanzania, along the eastern coast of Africa, more than 50 billion cubic feet of helium was just discovered. This discovery — and the technique that enabled it — provides relief for a dwindling global reserve that is just as essential to particle accelerators and MRI machines as it is frivolously wasted on balloons and birthday parties.
A modern high field clinical MRI scanner. MRI machines are the largest medical or scientific use of helium today. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user KasugaHuang, under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 license.
Helium may be the second most abundant element in the Universe, but it’s quite a rarity on Earth. The second lightest element in the periodic table, it’s named for Helios, the ancient greek sun god, because it was discovered on the Sun, spectroscopically, before it was ever found on Earth. It wasn’t until 1882, where that same unique spectral line was seen in the lava flowing from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius CKSNY +%. It was isolated a few years later by chemically treating igneous rocks, which separated the noble gases from the atoms they were bound together with. Perhaps not ironically, the new technique the scientists used to discover the helium in Tanzania made use of this exact knowledge and set of volcanic conditions.
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