Primordial hydrogen lurks in Earth's core, deposited there when Earth was born. Its presence tells us that Earth formed in the presence of nebular gas.
Something ancient and primordial lurks in Earth’s core. Helium 3 was created in the first minutes after the Big Bang, and some of it found its way through time and space to take up residence in Earth’s deepest regions. How do we know this?About five billion years ago, the Sun was born in a cloud of gas called the solar nebula. The remainder of that gas is mostly long gone now, dispersed into space by the solar wind.
Helium exists in nine isotopes, but only two are stable: Helium 3 and Helium 4. 4He outnumbers 3He by a million to one in Earth’s atmosphere. 4He comes from the decay of heavy radioactive elements, mainly uranium and thorium. But not 3He. Most 3He dates back billions of years to the Big Bang. Most of the Universe’sScientists know that Earth’s mantle contains primordial volatiles from the solar nebula. There’s evidence that volatiles are locked even deeper into the Earth, down in the core.
As Earth formed from the solar nebula, it continuously accumulated helium, and that accumulation is the first chapter. But sometime around 50 million years after Earth formed, there was a calamity. A protoplanet about one-third Earth’s size, named Theia, crashed into the Earth. Molten debris flew into space and rotated around the Earth. That material eventually coalesced into the Moon, while some of it fell back to Earth.
Impact events, of which the Theia impact is the most significant, played a large role in depleting the mantle’s volatiles. A
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