

Yellowstone Supervolcanoe begins de-gassing rare Helium 4 isotope - cbennett
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-yellowstone-helium-degassing-20140218,0,1665876.story

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gus_massa
The article is interesting, but can we change the title please?!?!

The current title in HN is " _Yellowstone Supervolcanoe begins de-gassing rare
Helium 4 isotope_ ". Helium 4 is the most comon Helium isotope, the article
says that the degasing started 2 millon years ago ("recentlty" in geological
time). The URL is ...\la-sci-sn-yellowstone-helium-degassing-... , so this was
probably the original title.

The current title of the article is " _It 's up, up and away for ancient
trapped helium at Yellowstone_". It's a little confusing and a little
uninformative, but at least it's not wrong.

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pdkl95
The title is quite accurate, as helium achieves escape velocity and escapes
the Earth's gravity when it is released in the atmosphere, making it one of
the _rarest_ elements, in the long-term.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZkMQkHGj1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZkMQkHGj1s)
[https://medium.com/starts-with-a-
bang/6757fcdaa283](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/6757fcdaa283)

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gus_massa
Helium is a rare element in Earth, but Helium 4 is the most common isotope:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium)

> He^3 : 0.000137% *

> He^4 : 99.999863% *

> * Atmospheric value, abundance may differ elsewhere

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pdkl95
Of course, but Helium - _any isotope_ \- is quite rare and our supply
strictly[1] decreases with time.

In fact, both (very useful) isotopes are rare for different reasons. He3 got
expensive - enough to seriously impact medical and scientific uses - when we
decided a beta-detector was needed across in port. (He4 we just waste in party
balloons _sigh_ )

[1] well, almost. Capturing alpha particles works, but good luck filling the
LHC or your local MRI scanner from a source that expensive.

