Helium in the Atmosphere

Helium is produced on the Earth by natural radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium in rocks, and over many years a major proportion of this helium would have passed into the atmosphere.  Helium is a bit like nitrogen, and quite safe – unless it replaces the oxygen in the air, but then that would be true of any gas.  Probably the worst that can be said of it is that, if you breathe a lot of it in, anything you say comes out as a squeak!

We can measure the amount of helium in the atmosphere today, and compare it with what should be there if the atmosphere had been unchanged for four and a half thousand million years (the presumed age of the Earth).  When this is done we find only 0.035% of the helium that ought to be present.

Doing the maths puts an absolute outside limit on the age of the atmosphere at about 175,000 years, and it is probably significantly lower.  As before, there is no time for any sort of evolution to have taken place, even assuming that it was possible.  But it gets better (well, worse for Evolutionists).

The first excuse made by the scientists for this result was that much of the helium has been lost.  It is a low-density gas and it is easy to conjecture that it would move to the upper atmosphere and be lost into space.  But we now know that helium is not being lost.  Hydrogen is less dense than helium, and hydrogen is not being lost in this way, and if hydrogen isn’t being lost then it is exceedingly unlikely that much helium is being lost.

If anything is happening it is exactly the opposite.  We now know that helium is actually being gained by the atmosphere.  Just as the Earth sweeps up meteoric dust as it circles the Sun, it also collects helium.  The helium in this case comes from the Sun itself.  The Sun is basically a huge, continuously burning hydrogen bomb, and the major product of the nuclear reactions that take place within it is helium.  This is ejected in vast quantities and as a result the Earth is constantly passing through a sort of helium ‘wind’.  This would add immense quantities of helium to what is already in the Earth’s atmosphere.

This brings the possible maximum age of the atmosphere down into the tens of thousands of years, or even less.  So what price evolution now?

Objections come from
www.holysmoke.org/icr6dud.htm
This reference is typical of most on this subject.  It uses purely theoretical arguments, ignores the problem that hydrogen does not actually escape anything like as fast as it should - the reference merely quotes a theoretical calculation - and ignores the most important helium source – that swept up by the Earth in its orbit.  The objections have been answered quite well at
www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v8/i2/helium.asp

Conclusion
“It certainly seems that the creationist position is correct, on the basis of the latest observational evidence.  As Chamberlain and Hunten admitted as recently as 1987, the helium escape problem ‘will not go away, and it is unsolved.’”  (Chamberlain, J. W. and D. M. Hunten 1987.  Theory of Planetary Atmospheres, 2nd Ed. Academic Press), p. 372)  (My emphasis.)