Scientists have found evidence that the core of our planet could be leaking. They made this remarkable discovery after studying 62-million-year-old lava rocks on Baffin Island in the Arctic Archipelago and found unusually high levels of helium-3 (He), a rare isotope. This is a significant finding because it indicates that the inner layers of our planet are swapping materials, which was never previously known to happen. The research was conducted by geochemists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the journal Nature.
The discovery is a big deal because helium-3, by its very Nature, is not supposed to reach the Earth’s surface, at least not on this planet. When it reaches the surface, it typically escapes into the atmosphere and is eventually ejected into space. But because this rare isotope was found in lava at the surface of our planet, it implies that it somehow escaped the Earth’s core and made its way into the mantle.
If this is the case, it would indicate that there are traces of the Earth’s core in the molten rock that make up our volcanoes and oceans, as well as underground structures like lava tubes. The inner Earth is more complex than the clean divisions of the planet we learned about in school, where the core and mantle are kept separate.
While it is unclear how the helium-3 got from the core to the mantle, scientists believe it may have something to do with how the planet formed and evolved. They believe the metallic core may have a reservoir of helium-3 that is constantly replenished from the nebula in which our solar system formed, and it is this helium-3 that is seeping into our planet’s interior as time goes by.
Helium-3 is critical to understand because it has the potential to be used to initiate nuclear fusion in experiments that might produce large amounts of energy. However, these attempts are still in the very early stages of development. So far, researchers have been unable to achieve fusion at conditions close to those in the core of our star. But if they can learn more about how the isotopes of helium are distributed, it could help them to find more efficient methods of producing fusion power on Earth. Helium-3 is a primordial substance created shortly after the Big Bang, and it is scarce on our planet, with only about three atoms for every 10,000 atoms of regular helium. This is because helium-3 escapes into the atmosphere and space when it makes it to our planet’s surface, making it challenging to study. But because helium-3 was discovered at the surface of our planet, it suggests other ways to access core materials, as well. This is a monumental discovery that rewrites everything we thought we knew about our planet’s core.
