Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but on Earth it's become harder and harder to find. Stores at the U.S. Federal Helium Reserve—a government-run stockpile established in the 1920s to supply a fleet of airships that would never arrive—account for 30 percent of the world's helium supply but is expected to be running dry by 2020.

That will have effects on things much more important than the party balloon industry; with a boiling point near absolute zero, the inert gas has all kinds of applications and uses in medicine and technology. It's crucial in everything from MRI machines to particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. But on the verge of a serious shortage, researches have found a whole new stash.

At the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference, researchers from the UK have shared their discovery of a massive cache of helium underground in the Tanzanian East African Rift valley, where it is currently bubbling up through murky pools. According to early estimates, there is at least 54 billion cubic feet of helium hiding out. Or, as researcher on the project Chris Ballentine put it:

This is enough to fill over 1.2 million medical MRI scanners. To put this discovery into perspective, global consumption of helium is about 8 BCf per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world's largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf.

The cache, if as big as estimated, would be a 30 percent boost to the United States' total supply, and the US is already the producer of 75 percent of the world's helium.

The find should take some of the pressure off the wells in Amarillo, Texas which, while appearing as little more than unassuming holes in the desert ground, have been laboring at full capacity for years just to slow the expenditure of a finite supply. It couldn't have come at a better time.

Source: Popular Science

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