helium – GOLLYGEE!

In this week’s Science Magazine, Adrian Cho brings word of a looming shortage of helium in America:

For the second time in 8 months, a bill has been introduced in Congress that would prevent an acute but wholly self-inflicted shortage of helium from striking later this year. The shortage would hamstring research in a variety of fields. “Unless Congress takes swift action, the U.S. will float off the helium cliff,” said Representative Doc Hastings (R–WA), chair of the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee and co-sponsor of the bipartisan bill, during a hearing this week.

Here’s the problem. Since 1996, the U.S. government has been selling off its vast reserve of helium, a legacy of the Cold War, which is held in an underground reservoir near Amarillo, Texas. Those sales supply 42% of the crude helium consumed in the United States and 35% of the crude helium consumed globally. But by law, they will continue only until the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which controls the reserve, recoups the $1.4 billion cost of developing the reserve. BLM will reach that break-even point by the end of this fiscal year, 30 September. At that point, BLM will have no authority to sell the remaining helium unless Congress acts.

More here.

Image from yabbedoo travel & tech.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Grand Canyon was carved out by the Colorado some 6-7 million years ago. Now, new chemical studies of the helium spectra of Canyon rock are calling that wisdom into question claiming that the canyon is over 60 million years old. From Science News:

But the new study, reported online November 29 in Science, looks instead at the chemistry of rocks exposed throughout the canyon. Rocks get cooler as erosion strips away the material above them. That cooling is chemically preserved in several ways, including in helium within the mineral apatite.

“When the apatite is hot, the helium simply diffuses out of the crystal; when the apatite is cold, helium is completely retained,” says study leader Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado Boulder. “So by measuring the helium we are constraining when the rock went from hot to cold as it moved closer to the Earth’s surface, or as the Earth’s surface moved closer to the rock as the canyon was carved.”

Flowers and Kenneth Farley of Caltech looked at helium in apatite crystals throughout the canyon, including how the element was distributed within the crystals — which gives more clues as to whether the rock cooled slowly or quickly. The scientists concluded that some ancient river must have carved out a chasm roughly the shape and size of the Grand Canyon by around 70 million years ago.

Not everyone is convinced by the new findings, which build on earlier work from the same research team. Karl Karlstrom, a geologist at the University of New Mexico, says that there must have been canyons throughout the area 70 million years ago, but most geological evidence supports the modern canyon — what visitors see today when standing at the rim — appearing only in the last 5 million to 6 million years.

Also check the New York Times and Science for more.

GOLLYGEE!

Tag: helium

america’s impending helium shortage

how old is the grand canyon