A lot of us don’t know surprisingly little about the world we live on, even though we’ve lived here our whole lives.
But even though we might not fully understand Earth and how we got here, scientists are still working hard to help us learn as much as they can about our world.
Scientists have recently made a worrisome discovery, though, that has made us think more about our country than it has answered.
Scientists and geochemists have been studying Earth’s basic make-up by testing old lava to learn more about the universe. What they’ve found has scientists scratching their heads.
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Last year, their study was published in the scientific journal Nature. It showed that the Earth’s core might be leaking.
Scientists looked into lava flows from 62 million years ago on Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago and found an unusually high amount of helium-3.
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Not sure? It basically means that the Earth’s core might be leaking into this matter, which has never been seen before because scientists thought it was impossible because the core was thought to be geochemically separate from the outer layers.
That is no longer the case thanks to the work of geochemists from the California Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
When they looked more closely at readings from Baffin Island’s old lava flows, they discovered the largest amounts of helium-3, helium-4, and a third isotope that have ever been found in volcanic rocks on land.
For that reason, helium-3 quickly rises into the air and into space. If it’s now found on the surface, it probably came from the core.
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He told VICE, “We know very little about Earth’s core, other than the fact that it exists.” Forrest Horton is a geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This makes looking into the core both interesting and annoying.
“In the past, scientists thought that the mantle and crust, which are the inner and outer layers of our world, were geochemically separate, which means that matter doesn’t move between them. Scientists are questioning this idea more and more.
Researchers have found something “exciting” that makes them think the Earth’s core and deep layers hold a lot more information than was first thought.
But Horton thinks that the study isn’t over yet and that what his team found has changed everything.
In many ways, his study didn’t solve all of them, so there is still a lot of work to be done.
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