Yellowstone Supervolcanoe begins de-gassing rare Helium 4 isotope

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-yellowstone-helium-degassing-20140218,0,1665876.story

by cbennett • 12 years ago

7 5 12 years ago

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

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.

pdkl952• 12 years ago

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://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/6757fcdaa283

gus_massa2• 12 years ago

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

He^3 : 0.000137% *
He^4 : 99.999863% *
* Atmospheric value, abundance may differ elsewhere

warrenmar• 12 years ago

I thought the title was misleading enough to warrant a comment. It makes it seem like the Helium-4 isotope is exotic. Losing Helium-4 to the atmosphere is an acceptable research cost. Losing Helium-3 is not.

Yellowstone Supervolcanoe begins de-gassing rare Helium 4 isotope

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