Most people are well aquianted with food, baby formula, and water shortages, but what about a helium shortage? After Hydrogen, Helium is the most abundant element and liquid helium is the coldest in the universe. Helium is mostly a gas but can be a fluid when at temperatures near absolute zero. It’s a natural resource and is most commonly used for party and parade balloons, scientific research, space explanation, medical technology, and high-tech manufacturing.

Helium is produced by 14 different plants that are spread all around the world. Recently the largest of these plants have been hit by disaster, which caused the helium shortage. Additionally, this past January there was a gas leak at the US helium plant. It shut down for repairs and has been closed since, which levels down a third of the world’s helium supply. As if things couldn’t get worse, Russia had created a new Helium plant, but soon enough an explosion damaged the plant. 

Around last year, when the global liquid helium shortage struck, it had many doctors worried about one of liquid helium’s most important uses: MRI.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging is used in the radiology field to scan pictures of the body’s anatomy. MRI’s use magnetic fields, radio waves, and magnetic field gradients to form pictures of organs in the body, helping to diagnose cancer, tumors, disease, joint/spinal injury, and damaged ligaments. 

An MRI cannot function without its magnets cool enough to work, so to do an MRI scan there have to be liters of ultra-cold liquid helium. But since helium is running low, and it’s non-renewable, doctors and hospitals have to plan for a future when there’s a much smaller supply. Because of this shortage, scientists have stopped experiments, weather balloon observations are being conducted by the US Weather Service, and the University of Nebraska has stopped releasing hundreds of balloons every time they score a touchdown so The University of Nebraska’s medical system has enough helium for patients. 

This is the fourth world helium shortage since 2006 and it is called “Helium Shortage 4.0”. Over the past years, the economy has faced helium shortages as helium production has struggled to increase. This past September the US government sold its helium facilities, and the world’s helium supply will be in the hands of the private market.