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Groundwater helium level could signal potential risk of earthquakes, according to researchers who discovered a relationship between levels of the noble gas and the amount of stress exerted on inner rock layers of Earth.
Scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan hope the finding will lead to the development of a monitoring system which catches stress changes that could foreshadow a big earthquake.
Researchers found that when the stress exerted on Earth’s crust was high, the levels of a helium isotope, helium-4, released in the groundwater was also high at sites near the epicentre of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.3 in Richter scale.
They compared the changes of helium-4 levels from chemical analyses of these samples with those from identical analyses performed in 2010.
“After careful analysis, we concluded that the levels of helium-4 had increased in samples that were collected near the epicentre due to the gas released by the rock fractures,” said lead author Yuji Sano of the University of Tokyo.
The study appears in the journal Scientific Reports.
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