Helium is used for a variety of things — to keep satellite instruments cool, to fill balloons, to clean rocket engines — which is why researchers are ecstatic over the discovery of a giant helium gas field in Tanzania's East African Rift Valley, estimated at more than 54 billion cubic feet.
"This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away," Prof. Chris Ballentine of Oxford University's Earth Sciences Department told the BBC. Helium is formed by the steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock, and researchers say in the Rift Valley, volcanic activity is releasing helium buried in old rocks that becomes trapped in shallower gas fields. Because the world's helium supply was being depleted, the price has gone up 500 percent over the last 15 years.
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