Helium – going up in the world

One of the most abundant gasses in the universe (actually second to hydrogen) is being increasingly less so on the planet – not a surprise really if you consider the nature of the gas – escaping the planet as soon as it's let go. It's as if the gas has some kind of resentment of gravity. But it's more so, that it's just more easy going, and the other gasses are just more attracted to the planet than the marauding helium.

Pierre Janssen was a French astronomer who discovered helium in 1868. He was observing a solar eclipse in India when he noticed the yellow spectral emission lines of the element. An English astronomer by the name of Norman Lockyer observed the same spectra and proposed the name helium after the Greek name for the sun, Helios. Helium can be observed at 587.49 nanometres in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the Sun.

The gas is inert, colourless and has no obnoxious smell or smell of any kind, but is far from useless. Apart from the jovial practice of inhaling the stuff and making your voice sound like 'Minime' being hurtled into space, there are plenty of practical uses too. It's used for diving, when combined with oxygen in scuba tanks to provide the correct 'atmosphere' for the high pressures of the deep. It's used as a lightweight aeronautical fuel, it's fundamental in treating breathing ailments in patients, used in cooling down MRI machines in a supercooled liquid state, used to cool super-conduction magnets in construction (welding), and used in barcode reading as helium-neon lasers.

The gas, because it's so inert doesn't combine with other gasses and can exist as a liquid at temperatures where other elements would just freeze. To get it to this superfluid state is relatively easy (-271ºc), and behaves as one object; no viscosity or resistance to flow.Current research has utilised the superfluid state of helium to the nano-scale; an experiment of squirting the liquid into vacuum chambers through tiny nozzles at speeds of 200 meters/second allows researches to see the fluid act according to quantum behaviour:

“From a distance, the droplets' behaviour looks almost banal. They rotate and compress slightly, going from spherical to a little bit flattened, just as a droplet of regular rotating liquid might do. […] these droplets are behaving according to the rules of quantum physics, which deal with the behaviour of nano-sized objects. Inside each droplet is a grid of tornado-like vortices. The sum of the rotation of these infinitesimally small tornadoes is what drives the rotation of the entire droplets". Oliver Gessner said (senior scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab; Southern California).

He Goes on: "If you find that a certain law of physics is valid for a certain speed or a certain size of object, is it also valid for something that is 100,000 times bigger or 100,000 times faster?" he said. The equivalent might be building a sandcastle a meter, or about three feet tall, and then testing to find out if you can use the same design principles to build a sandcastle 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, tall.” Gessner said.

This is important because it allows for further testing of quantum mechanical rules on things larger than those usually encompassed; a thing which is practically without reach in today's science, and known use of elements.

Running out?

The main reason why we're running out of helium is because of a law passed in 1996 made helium 'too cheap to recycle'; The National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas was only just kept afloat; as it was scheduled to be sold off at 'whatever the price' by 2015, but that has been delayed a few years to sell off gradually. The Federal Helium Reserve, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, holds over 40 percent of the helium used annually in the United States. Professor Richardson, who won a noble prize for his work on helium-3 co-chaired an enquiry into this debacle and is turning heads in the direction of helium in the process:

"As a result of that Act, helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious resource," he said. "It's being squandered." Professor Richardson believes the price for helium should rise by between 20- and 50-fold to make recycling more worthwhile. NASA, for instance, makes no attempt to recycle the helium used to clean is rocket fuel tanks, one of the single biggest uses of the gas.

Efforts of those such as Professor Richardson are helping to abate some of the feckless disregard for the noble gas, and is aiding in the gasses longevity on Earth. Though, the simple fact is that with any resource, it will eventually run out, and be expunged to the outer-atmosphere of the planet; at that point it would be too expensive and difficult to reclaim and we will be without the gas in many departments around the world. The key to this issue is in understanding that this is an issue, and to change minds of people to think carefully about how we use the Earth's resources. Nothing is without consequence, and certainly this is the case for the least volatile/reactive element in the table.