Thinking about the future, many of us cannot escape the nagging question of what will happen on this I planet when it runs out of its resources of oil and gas. The obvious solution is to look for the sources of new types of fuel. The popular science magazine Zemlya i Vselennaya (Earth and Universe) has published an article on the subject by an expert in the field Prof. Alexander Portnov, Dr. Sc. (Geol. & Mineral.). He focused on the prospects of using hydrogen*, vast amounts of which are contained in volcanoes. Its active role in volcanic eruptions releases into the atmosphere vast amounts of energy. As for hydrogen in general, this most widespread element of cosmos, makes up (in the form of plasma) more than 70 percent of the Sun and stars; on the Earth it is included in water, living organisms, coal and oil. And no one could stop and think that volumes of hydrogen can be concentrated in the bowels of our planet. What had been noticed for quite some time is that hydrogen escapes from the depths of the oceans. In the 1970s Russian scientists put forward a hypothesis about the Earth having not an iron-nickel core, but a "hydrate" one containing super-compressed hydrogen allegedly left from the protoplanetary stage of the Earth formation. But the present state of this core is unknown. It could contain proton plasma which, when saturated with electrons, generates atoms of hydrogen with the release of vast thermal energy. And it is not excluded that the gas thus produced saturates the iron-nickel core-this phenomenon is called occlusion; it is most noticeable in platinum and palladium which can aggregate hydrogen. And let's not forget that the fusion of two atoms of the latter is also accompanied by the release of vast volumes of heat which can explain the high temperature of plutonic geological processes (naturally, apart from the energy of radioactive decay). But how do volcanoes "exhale" hydrogen? Geologists have long paid attention to gas discharges from th ... Read more