Madeleine Finlay

And in those containers, it's shipped around the world.

But they do have a lifespan in the sense that after about a month to a month and a half, the insulation...

that keeps it cool is eventually slowly going to heat up and the liquid inside is going to once again return to its gas form.

And that's obviously not what you want because you don't want it expanding and you don't want the gas escaping.

There are two things at play.

The first is this

effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that has stopped supplies from being shipped from Qatar.

So all the huge containers of helium that have been stuck in the Persian Gulf for two or three weeks now, it looks like they're going to stay there, slowly heating up.

Next is the Iranian attacks on Qatar's natural gas facilities in Ras Laffan and Mesayid, which halted production in early March 2020.

Last week, there was a report in Reuters that the state-owned company Qatar Energy were preparing to restart the production.

That could take a while.

It always takes a while for these things to get back up and running to full capacity.

And Al Jazeera actually recently reported that Qatar Energy estimates its overall helium exports are going to go down by about 17%.

I haven't seen any reports that the major industries have been massively impacted yet.

The helium market is a strange and chaotic world and prices and availability seem totally all over the place.

Sophia actually showed me a graph of this and it was just a total mess.

But when I asked Sophia about what it was like for the scientists like her and labs,

She said that the belt was tightening already.

And in fact, she told me that she'd heard of multiple researchers in the US who have gotten letters from their suppliers telling them they've been cut to half of their normal allocation.

And she said this was an alarming situation.