Beach chair science: the third gas

If you’re looking for a great beach chair read, something enjoyable and informative, I can recommend “Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe,” by Ray Jayawardhana. I might write about the book some other time, but, for now, I’m going to pursue a tangent that the book inspired. That tangent is a gas called “argon.”

Argon is all around you. You’re breathing it right now. Argon, as a matter of fact, is the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere.

And yet it doesn’t get much attention. That doesn’t seem fair to poor old argon. After all, third place will get you a bronze medal in the Olympics. Third place will get you a winning “show” payoff in a horse race. You’d think, then, that argon deserves something more than obscurity for its efforts.

But it’s not total obscurity I guess. I have seen the name a few times. In some long-ago grade school science class I remember a single, curt line from a textbook stating that the earth’s atmosphere in 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and 0.93 percent argon. And then in school to learn how to drive airplanes we were taught the same thing, including, notably, that very precise-sounding zero-point-nine-three percent figure.

We hear about nitrogen and oxygen all the time, of course, but for me, argon was just a disembodied word, something I recognized on a test but that had no other associations.

As for the neutrino-hunting realm, argon is used in certain scientific instruments relating to the study of neutrinos. That’s how it earned a mention in the “Neutrino Hunters” book, and that’s why I decided to finally take a look at this argon thing.

Argon, as it turns out, is one of several “noble gasses,” gasses that don’t readily react with other elements. Since it’s not inclined to react with other elements, argon’s good behavior makes it useful in some welding applications, in some sorts of diving situations (where it supplants nitrogen), in lamps and lights (sometimes in combination with other noble gasses), and in various scientific and industrial applications that I’ll never be able to understand.

Some other noble gasses, sort of siblings to argon, get more name recognition at the street level. Helium, for example, is well-known as the stuff they put in blimps and balloons. It’s also very important for the cooling circuits in medical imaging equipment. The U.S., in fact, has a strategic helium reserve.

Another famous noble gas is neon, the stuff that’s used in store signs.

Some other noble gasses probably aren’t as famous, but we hear about them sometimes in industrial applications. These include xenon and krypton, which, like neon, are established players in the light business.

Another noble gas, radon, is radioactive, and is a health threat if it seeps from the earth into your house. That’s a problem in some parts of the world, but I’ve never heard of it being a factor in Saipan.

In order to isolate them and bottle them up for use, argon, neon, and several other gasses are culled from the air by freezing the air into a liquid state, and then separating the gasses as the air warms up again.

Helium, incidentally, isn’t gathered from the air. It’s so light that it just floats away and the atmosphere can’t retain it. Helium, however, is often co-located with natural gas deposits, so it’s harvested as a byproduct of natural gas wells.

Nature’s noble elements are listed in the far right-hand column of the periodic table of the elements. Take a look at the table, and you’ll see them listed by their two-letter symbols, which, going from lightest to heaviest, are He (helium), Ne (neon), Ar (argon; yea, argon!), Kr (krypton), Xe (xenon), and Rn (radon).

Overall, then, my impression of argon is that it’s a friendly and unassuming element. It’s happy to just be argon, and it doesn’t go looking for trouble. It doesn’t mess with or corrode the other materials out there. It doesn’t mess with those of us who are breathing it, either. And it helps scientists and inventors do, uh, scientific and inventive things.

That’s not a bad tally in my book. So let’s raise a toast to argon this weekend. For a third place finisher with a zero-point-nine-three percent score, I’d say that argon has held its own pretty well.