Tom Wright, age 12, of West Des Moines, Iowa, for his question:
WHERE DO WE GET HELIUM?
Evidence of helium in the sun was discovered by an English astronomer named Sir Joseph Lockyer in 1868. He found his evidence while studying the sun's light during an eclipse. He gave the gas and chemical element its name which he took from the Greek word helios, meaning sun. Helium was first found on earth in 1895 in the mineral clevite.
Helium is a chemical element and lightweight gas. It is called a noble gas or an inert gas because it does not combine with other elements.
Helium makes up only a tiny fraction of the earth's matter. But it makes up about 23 percent of the matter in the visible universe because the sun and other stars are made mostly of helium and hydrogen.
Most of the world's helium comes from five natural¬gas fields in the United States. The Cliffside field is located in the Texas Panhandle while the Greenwood field is in Kansas and Colorado. The giant Hugoton field stretches across parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas while the Keys field is in Oklahoma and the Panhandle field is all in Texas.
The Five American fields contain an estimated 180 billion cubic feet of helium. Helium plants produce about 2 billion cubic feet of helium each year. The United States government, near the Cliffside field, stores more than half of this amount underground for future use.
Natural gas from some wells contains up to eight percent helium. Helium is then purified by cooling the natural gas until all gases except helium, argon, hydrogen and nitrogen change to liquid. Hydrogen is then burned out of the remaining mixture and argon is absorbed by charcoal at low temperatures. Nitrogen often remains in helium as an impurity. Helium that is 99.995 percent pure is called grade A helium. Crude helium contains about half helium and half nitrogen.
About 700 million cubic feet of helium are used in the United States each year, with about a quarter of it going to private industries and the rest being used by federal agencies. The government's chief use of helium is in maintaining the proper pressures in rockets and to fill high altitude scientific balloons.
Helium was first found in natural gas in Kansas in 1903.
In 7929, the United States Bureau of Mines started to produce helium at Amarillo, Texas. Since then, other government plants have been built in Kansas, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. Privately owned helium plants are found in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, and there's also one in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Deep sea divers sometimes breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen to prevent an illness called nitrogen narcosis.