If the Earth could talk, perhaps it would tell us that it has a little “incontinence” problem. Don't laugh, it's serious. A team of scientists has discovered high levels of helium-3 on Baffin Island, an island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago: it could be a sign that the Earth's core is leaking material.
Because it is important? This discovery could be a key to unlocking geological mysteries that have eluded us for centuries.
The heart of the Earth may have a leak
Imagine you have a pressure cooker that starts to lose steam. Now, imagine that this pressure cooker is the core of the Earth. A team of geologists and chemists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and from California Institute of Technology has found a strong clue linked to the possibility that the core of our planet has a loss of material. It's called Helium-3: do you know it? We talked about it in the past, in relation to the Moon, where it seems to be present in abundance.
Helium-3 is a rare isotope, a relic of the time when the Earth was forming. It is so precious and rare that finding it on the surface is like winning the geological lottery. And the prize is the prospect of studying the terrestrial core like never before.
Baffin Island: Where Earth Reveals Its Secrets
The study of several lava flows on Baffin Island, as I said, found higher levels of helium-3 than anywhere else on Earth. If research leads us to discover the origin of this "loss" of material and its path, we could have access to secrets that have until now been jealously guarded by the center of our planet, a true "black box" of our origins.
The evidence also collected in previous studies suggest that an object one-third the size of Earth struck the planet early in its history, about 4 billion years ago, and that impact would have melted the Earth's crust, allowing much of the helium to escape. The gas evidently continues to escape today.
If Helium-3 is coming to Baffin Island from the Earth's core, scientists say, other materials are probably doing so, too. New avenues await us in geology, physics and even environmental science.
For further details, you can consult the study published in the journal Nature (I link it here).
