Do We Still Have Enough Fuel Resources To Last Until 2025?

Fuel always had a key role in the planet - from plate tectonics to volcanic activities, to their use in modern technology, there is no question that the planet is running on such important resource.

However, with the way we consume so much of it, people wonder just how much fuel we have left of it by the end of the year 2025. A study called "Revealing the Earth's mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment," which was published in Scientific Reports, said that geologists and neutrino physicists determined how much fuel we still have on Earth through a tiny subatomic particle called geoneutrinos, which come from nuclear reactions from stars and man-made nuclear reactors and radioactive processes in the earth's interior.

Nature World News reported that to detect antineutrinos, a detector a size of a building is needed - and it will identify the frequency of the antineutrinos' collision into hydrogen atoms, which then relates to the amount of uranium and thorium in the planet.

William McDonough, one of the authors of the study said, "Once we collect three years of antineutrino data from all five detectors, we are confident that we will have developed an accurate fuel gauge for the Earth and be able to calculate the amount of remaining fuel inside Earth."

Detecting these particles have been particularly slow, but researchers are hoping to speed things up by the arrival of new detectors by 2022, which will be buried under the Himalayan slopes and near the coast of southern China. McDonough explained that in determining the amount of radioactive power within the earth, we will know the Earth's energy consumption rate. He shared that by knowing how fast the planet has cooled down since its birth, we will know how long the fuel will last.