Earth’s mysterious core is, once again, baffling scientists with its strange behavior.
A study of 62-million-year-old lava flows on Baffin Island in the Arctic Archipelago has found unusually high levels of helium-3 (³He), a rare isotope that is associated with the insides of our planet.
The study suggests the Earth’s core may be leaking the rare helium, upheaving the belief that the giant ball of molten iron at the center of our planet is sealed away.
“I find this exciting because it suggests that the deep Earth is more dynamic than we realized,” Forrest Horton, a geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and lead author on the study, told Vice’s Motherboard.
When ³He is found trapped in rock, scientists tend to think it comes from material that was bombarded by the sun at the very beginning of our planet’s history.
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That’s because Earth itself doesn’t produce much ³He, and any ³He that escapes from Earth floats straight into space. Additionally, ³He that comes from solar radiation today bounces back to space thanks to our planet’s magnetic field.
It follows that high levels of ³He found in rock today would have come from the birth of our planet.
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