The World Is Constantly Running Out Of Helium. Here’s Why It Matters.

Helium is the second-most common element in the universe, but it's comparatively rare on Earth. It also fulfills a surprising role in everything from space exploration to quantum computing.
Short Wave is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the periodic table with profiles of some of its favorite elements. Here are five things you may not have known about helium.
Helium is the only element on the planet that is a completely nonrenewable resource.
On Earth, helium is generated deep underground through the natural radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium. "It takes many, many millennia to make the helium that's here on the Earth," says Sophia Hayes, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis. The helium seeps up through the Earth's crust and gets trapped in pockets of natural gas, where it can be extracted.
Like hydrogen, its immediate predecessor on the periodic table, helium is lightweight. But unlike hydrogen, it doesn't readily combine with other elements. So, once helium reaches the surface, it can easily escape the Earth's gravitational pull.
Other resources, such as oil and gas, may turn into pollution or be difficult to recycle. But only helium physically disappears from the planet. "It's the one element out of the entire periodic table that escapes the Earth and goes out into outer space," Hayes says.
America once thought helium would turn the tide of war.
During World War I, aviation was still in its infancy, and dirigibles were considered cutting-edge weapons of war. German zeppelins were the strategic weapons of their time, drifting over civilian targets and dropping bombs from their gondolas.
But zeppelins had a critical vulnerability: They were filled with highly flammable hydrogen. After a few zeppelin raids over London, British troops developed incendiary bullets that would "light up the hydrogen in the dirigibles," says David Aubin, a professor for the history of science at Sorbonne Université in Paris.
Meanwhile, American scientists had just discovered large helium deposits in natural gas fields in places like Kansas. Aubin says the government quickly nationalized its nonflammable helium supply and rushed it to Europe to fill attack blimps.
The helium was not used before the war ended, Aubin says, but "they had thousands of cylinders filled, on the docks at New Orleans ready to be shipped to Europe in November of 1918, so it would have been used very soon."