Page:Radio-activity.djvu/517

 volume 3·3 × 10^3 c.c. with clay dug up from the garden, and placed it in a vessel of 30 litres capacity in which was placed an electroscope to determine the conductivity of the enclosed gas. After standing for several days, they found that the conductivity of the air reached a constant maximum value, corresponding to three times the normal. It will be shown later (section 284) that the normal conductivity observed in sealed vessels corresponds to the production of about 30 ions per c.c. per second. The number of ions produced per second in the vessel by the radio-active earth was thus about 2 × 10^6. This would give a saturation current through the gas of 2·2 × 10^{-14} electro-magnetic units. Now the emanation from 1 gram of radium stored in a metal cylinder gives a saturation current of about 3·2 × 10^{-5} electro-magnetic units. Elster and Geitel considered that most of the conductivity observed in the gas was due to a radio-active emanation, which gradually diffused from the clay into the air in the vessel. The increased conductivity in the gas observed by Elster and Geitel would thus be produced by the emanation from 7 × 10^{-10} gram of radium. Taking the density of clay as 2, this corresponds to about 10^{-13} gram of radium per gram of clay. But it has been shown that if 4·6 × 10^{-14} gram of radium were present in each gram of earth, the heat emitted would compensate for the loss of heat of the earth by conduction and radiation. The amount of activity observed in the earth is thus about the right order of magnitude to account for the heat emission required. In the above estimate, the presence of uranium and thorium minerals in the earth has not been considered. Moreover, it is probable that the total amount of radio-activity in the clay was considerably greater than that calculated, for it is likely that other radio-active matter was present which did not give off an emanation.

If the earth is supposed to be in a state of thermal equilibrium in which the heat lost by radiation is supplied from radio-active matter, there must be an amount of radio-active matter in the earth corresponding to about 270 million tons of radium. If there were more radium than this in the earth, the temperature gradient would be greater than that observed to-day. This may appear to be a very large quantity of radium, but recent determinations (section 281) of the amount of radium emanation in the atmosphere