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Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth's Crust
AtariAmarok writes "A new article is up on LiveScience about a hole drilled into the Earth's crust to explore the layers of our planet's substrate. The hole gets closer to the mantle than any other efforts that have gone before. The hole might reach the "Moho" (division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle) within a few years." From the article: "The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness."
Good day, gentlemen...as you are no doubt aware, I have drilled a gigangtic hole straight through the Earth's crust. This hole will allow me to usher in a glorious new era of total world domination; for this reason, I have dubbed this latest caper "Operation Glory-Hole".
You see, gentleman, the bottom of this hole is only a scant 1000 feet away from the firey liquid mantle of the Earth itself...when I detonate a small nuclear device at the bottom of this hole, Operation Glory-Hole will create a gigantic super-volcano, radically altering the Earth's climate and laying waste to civilization...that is, unless you pay me...
ONE HUNDRED MILLION BILLION JILLION DOLLARS!!!
Gentleman, you have my demands. Peace out.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Check this baby out, dug me a hole!
--Joey Tribbiani
I for one, welcome our moleman overlords.
Is the link at the bottom which talks about the idea of using a nuke to drop a probe to the earths core.
Why clone Unix when I can clone Windows instead. http://www.reactos.org
So how many turns does it take to get to the center of the Earth? *crunch*
There's no tampon made than could contain the leak that would create.
Bad Scientists! Bad!
+6 energy
WARNING: Significant negative ecological impact
Dante would be proud
And then you come to the caramel lower mantle, then the delicious chocolate core.
music lover since 1969
That's happening all the time on the sea floor, where the plates are slowly separating.
A bunch of lava will squish out, immediatly cool, and plug the hole, and they'll have to start all over again.
Kind of like Cool Hand Luke.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Like a volcano?
Pfft. I nearly made it from my sandbox to China with nothing but buckets back in my preschool days!
Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
> bottom of this hole is only a scant 1000 feet
> away from the firey liquid mantle of the Earth
> itself...when I detonate a small nuclear device
> at the bottom of this hole, Operation Glory-Hole
> will create a gigantic super-volcano
Would any geologists care to comment whether it is possible to create an artificial island this way?
...it says "Bruce Willis woz here".
Jonathanjk.com
Yes, this is exactly what will happen. Just think of it like pricking a hole in a balloon, next thing you know we are 'ppttthhhhhhhhhh' on our way to Jupiter.
Yeah, we're screwed now.
Start working on your lava-boats everyone....
...this Dr. Evil hole is the greatest threat that mad-science presents to us.
What happens if when they finally penetrate the crust the whole planet pops like a balloon?
LIKE A BALLOON!!
Think of all that crazy magma spewing out all over the place and our beloved globe zooming randomly all over the solar system before finally falling flacid and empty to the floor somewhere near Mars.
When will these insane "geologists" learn not to poke holes in our Mother Earth.
-Pinkoir
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
and opening a hole will relieve that pressure and cause a large amount of it to flow out?
Why, yes, that can happen. Mind you, "large" is only on the human scale, and this is hardly an unusual circumstance.
What is essetnially (but not actually) mantle-juice flows out onto the crust on a somewhat irregular basis. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's quite specatcular when molten rock et al flow out.
As for a "large ammount" -- us drilling into the mantle is like us sticking a very large straw into the ocean. Sure, the water down at the bottom is under pressure, and it will shoot up the straw if we let it. But the ocean certainly isn't going anywhere.
Didn't the Doctor already save us fom this madness back in the 1970's? Doesn't anyone remember what a disaster it was?
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
EOS covered this recent work just recently. The problem with offset drilling is that it does not provide the same informatio as a continuous core. These cores are obtained from 'windows' in previous flows and there is a problem with correlation between boreholes when horizons are not sampled widely. This complicates the historical interpreation and genesis of the oceanic crust.
The demand for advanced drilling technology is one problem with the current Moho sampling efforts. Exploration drilling of the kind used for oil production is not well suited for the work that the ODP is engaged in. Bit designs for the lithostatic loads that these dense rocks develop at depth require a different approach than those used to drill continental sediments buried at depth beneath the ocean.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Start drilling from the other side NOW...
Would be fun to enjoy the world's largest magnetic seasaw.
No need to drill holes, there are several places on the earth's crust where the Moho is spilling right out...
"Our incredibly expensive uber-drill has pierced through to the earth's mantle! Now let's get it home before the magma damages.. oh crap.."
Wait a minute...
Are you trying to tell me that this whole damn time, we've never broken through the earth's crust and seen the mantle for ourselves? We can send something 8.7 billion miles away but we can't drill two miles down? Doesn't this strike people as a bit odd or disconcerting?
Personally I'd like to learn just as much about the earth under my feet as the stars above my head.
I'd like to see this get more funding and see us reach the mantle in the next few weeks instead of waiting for some time in the "coming years."
Don't forget the hole's only natural enemy is the pile
- My question is: Can Slashdot be Slashdotted? -
So you say we can make HawaIII this way?
Here's a diagram of Earth's layers:% 20tectonics/Earthcore.jpg
http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/images/plate
My only question is what if the enormous amount of pressure from the mantle forced tons of lava to shoot into the ocean? Or in reverse what if the pressure of the ocean was greater and we open a giant drain in the middle of the atlantic?
Would the lava/water contact just harden to rock instantly and allow nothing more through?
Probably quite ignorant fears, but still worth asking.
--
Fairfax Underground: Message boards and Chat for residents of Fairfax County and Northern Virginia
The same way we got the Dakotas. We walked up to the natives and said hey, lets have a treaty...
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
"Oblgatory?" "Grammer?" No capitalization at the beginning of your sentence? No punctuation at the end of it?
I guess the Grammar Nazis have adopted the "Do as we say, not as we do" policy.
No...everyone knows we reach China before anything else.
Damn near killed us all as I remember it.
But how smart is drilling into the core of the earth? Aren't they asking for one huge volcano?
No, as magma is coming up to the surface all the time all over the world in holes much, much larger than the borehole.
If someone who was hell bent on one HUGE suicide bomb, what is to stop a country from picking 4 or 5 places around the world, dig deep, and pack a nuke. Blow up the nuke, and the earth is rearranged.
Nothing much would happen. The energy already being released by normal volcanoes and earthquakes is far more than we could produce with nuclear weapons. For example, the Mount St. Helens volcano released energy in just one day (18 May 1980) equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT - about 20,000 Hiroshima bombs. That is a significant fraction of the entire world's current nuclear arsenal - from just one volcano! A few nukes exploded around the world is not going to do anything.
Aren't they asking for one huge volcano?
No. Well, maybe in the movies.
Think about it for a second. All over the world there a thousands of holes that already lead to the molten material, and yes- they are volcanoes.
BUT, how many of those are constantly spewing molten rock? Relatively few. And some of those are so consistent in their eruptions people live on them. Hawaii for one, Iceland another.
When a volcano like Tambora (largest recent) or even Fish Canyon or Yellowstone (28 million and 1.3 million YA, respectively) went off, the earth wasn't "rearranged." Sticking a nuke in a relatively tiny hole wouldn't even really have a major impact on the local area. It certainly wouldn't cause the kind of damage you're talking about. How many times have nukes been tested underground, or even above? The damage to the earth was minimal. It was all the things around the blast that suffered damage.
Worst case scenereo and the USA is relocated to the moon.
Unlikely, Fish Canyon only ejected about 5000 cubic kilometers and it was in the USA which is, obviously, still here.
R(k)
I doubt it, worst case scenario? They create a new volcano. Volcanos usually start underwater and build up in time when it flows and cools into new layers. There are small underwater volcanos all over the ocean.
Such a bore hole is typically only a few centimeters (10-15) across for a depth of several kilometers, the rising lava would cool down and solidify within a few hundreds of meters.
And what about terrorism.
If you'd read TFA you would have known this drilling is a very high tech exercise.
Doing it at several places simultaneously would require the worlds best equipment, even the CIA might notice...
But then, during the cold war some of the worlds largest nuclear explosions were already set off at the bottom of bore holes (a.o. in Nevada) and so far without much damage to anything more than a few kilometers away.
By the way, the story is weird in calling a 1400+ meters hole the third deepest ever drilled.
The oil industry routinely drills more than 6000 meters below the sea floor.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yes, it's unfortunate that the earth is like a big balloon. Oh wait a minute, it's not. Never mind.
Your tax dollars at work. How much money did this cost?
Here we go again.
In order to avoid these inevitable comments that appear in every thread with a scientific topic, I suggest that no international research project be allowed to proceed unless it has been cleared by a panel of Anonymous Cowards who have been convinced after watching the teevee for too long that all science is really a scam to squander their tax dollars on foolishness like basic research that shows no promise of an immediate economic benefit such as a drug that makes your peepee harder.
In response to your question, you might be able to maintain a botched occupation for a few hours with the money.
The mantle is under pressure because of the rock piled on top of it. It is not, as is sometimes believed, molten. And it won't goosh out like champagne when the cork is popped. Volcanoes do sometimes behave this way, but that's because they are isolated pockets of molten, gas-infused rock. When the confining pressure is removed, they do in fact goosh out lava like champagne. But that's a very different story.
The stuff that comes out of volcanoes is not pure mantle material. In fact, usually it's melted crustal material. Or some mixture of mantle and crustal material. Only occasionally do volcanoes cough up a hunk of mantle. More usually, we can look at pieces of mantle that may have gotten caught up in some tectonic process and been uplifted for us to see. But that's rare, and the rocks are often altered by other processes.
How long before Wal-Mart and/or IKEA uses drilling holes through the Earth to reduce supply-chain management costs. I envision, there could be a hole going from China to California and/or Seattle.
How much heat can those RFID tags resist anyways??!
I'm not sure if I imagined this or actually read about it.
A 20,000 foot hole was supposed to have been dug near where I live during WW II in a desperate effort to find oil. There is oil and gas around here, and there has been some exploration in the last ten years Sable Island to the south and Hibernia to the East (apparently a bullseye for US rocket debris!).
Here is the area:
Hillsborough Bay map. Near Govenor's Island (switch to map from Satellite image to see names.)
If you want to be really scared just look a few comments up in the thread. A Friends quote (with Joey no less!) has got a +5 Funny.
/. indeed. I think the balance has finally tipped. /. officially now has more AOLers than geeks.
Sad times for
Shouldn't you instead be comparing the energy released by normal volcanoes and the energy released by volcanoes initiated by a manmade charge (if indeed a charge in such a bore-hole could produce any such effect)?
No, because energy is energy! individual pressure releases from magma chambers can be pretty much equivalent to the effect of nuclear explosions.
If it were possible, for example, to crash the fault in the Bahamas with a nuclear charge, the resultant super-tsunami would also cause more damage to the US than the original explosion(s) relocated from the Bahamas to the US east-coast would, wouldn't it?
Well, yes, but that is not what the original poster was saying. This would neither produce a man-made volcano, or would it 'blow the USA to the moon'.
Also, how would you 'crash' the fault?
To quote from the California Geological Survey:
"..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
Holy crap - maybe they never thought of that - do you think someone should tell them?
Once again, the movie studios have already made a prediction about projects of this nature. The movie "Crack in the World" was released in 1965 and used then state of the art special effects to demonstrate what would happen if the Earth's core were penetrated.
Of course, like most Hollywood productions the science behind the script was malarkey. But it was still a pretty good movie for its' time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The pressure inside the balloon is much greater than the pressure outside the balloon
The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon. The reason balloons expand when you fill them with air is so that they equalize the pressures. Since the balloon is made of an elastic material without a rigid structure, maintaining equal pressures on either side of the membrane is the configuration that requires the least energy. As the balloon becomes really inflated, the latex can't stretch easily, and it does compress the air inside--but not much, just 5 or 6 mm of mercury.
when you prick it, the pressure equalizes, causing the balloon to pop
The "pop" isn't really related to the pressure equalizing. The latex is under high hoop and axial stress, and when it gets pricked, the hole that forms breaks lines of stress and the latex gets pulled away from the hole. This tears the latex, very rapidly--considerably faster than the speed of sound. The ends of the latex are under so much stress that they contract as fast as the tears occur, and create a small shockwave/sonic boom. When put scotch tape on the balloon where you prick it (before pricking it, of course), the strain around the hole isn't enough to start the tears, since that also requires tearing the scotch tape (or tearing away from it).
However, you're very right that we can't compare this to the earth, because the crust of the earth certainly isn't under high uniform elastic tension attempting to maintain internal and external pressures.
Unless you live in Chile or Argentina. Check out the antipodes map to see where you'd end up.
Click here for info on how this story really came about.
Someone finally did the leg work to track the story down. On the other hand, I would like to find the source of the Audio Clip.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
People? Boats? Endless seas of lava? Oh, great. If one person in Hollywood reads that, we're in trouble.
"Now in theaters: The sequel to smash hit Waterworld: Fireworld!"
yes, but that's not the point.
A single continuous drill hole ~2600m long is a very difficult thing to do. Many things can go wrong to block the hole or damage the drill string forcing abandonment of the hole.
Mine workings like the South African example are not easy by anymeans, but are very feasible since you are advancing 10 feet or so at a time in , shoring up everything as you go, and can easily replace any broken equipment, and work around most ground problems.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Yes, it is harder, but you are not 'digging' a hole, you are boring into the ground with a tube that supports the ground around it, usually lubricated with a slippery drilling mud that is pumped down the tube, out the drill bit.
... bored at a wider diameter, using the wider drill string in as a liner to support the hole while a smaller drill string continues through it deeper.
The drill bit is designed either to cut a tube of drill core from the rock that is recovered intact to the surface for analysis, or else to grind up the rock and wash out the material with the pumped water.
Usually the start of the hole is 'cased'
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
Of course a small part of the island close to the blast was raised - this is what happens with underground explosions! But, the main effect was a 40-foot deep crater. As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business becuase it wouldn't take much to cause destruction on a global scale if a few of the world's powers got into a fight.
Nuclear proliferation is a serious business because nuclear weapons are unpleasant and messy and could cause millions of deaths, but as for global destruction, we haven't a chance of doing anything serious. Every few million years we get hit by asteroids that have more energy than all of our nuclear weapons combined. These events cause little long-term damage either to the Earth or the diversity of species. Occasionally something big hits, like the dinosaur killer. That had an energy about 20,000 times greater (equivalent to 300 million nuclear weapons). It did a lot of damage, but life survived.
We have the capacity to make life very unpleasant for humanity, but we have nowhere near the capacity to cause anything like global destruction. If we had a nuclear war, most life on earth would barely notice it. (If you are worried about the radioactivity, consider the rich and life-filled forests that are happily coping with the environment around Chernobyl).
Way to totally miss the point.
.... a balloon.
The poster was describing how the earth is not like a balloon and that you cannot compare them.
Then, without any apparent thought or reasoning, you try and compare a balloon and a tyre.
Note that he mentioned that there was a small amount of pressure in the balloon. This is because balloons are stretchy - they stretch quite easily when inflated.
Tyres are a lot less stretchy, being:
(a) A hell of a lot thicker than your average balloon.
(b) bound and reinforced internally with plies to keep the whole thing from blowing up like
Tyres are a lot closer to a rigid disc than a balloon - they will (generally) only inflate to a certain volume. After that, the air pressure in a tyre rises substantially, allowing you to suspend your 1500kg car on a cushion of air trapped in the tyre.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I wish I had some mod points, I think I just learned more about balloons than I ever thought possible
"Moho" (division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle)
Not to be confused with Soho, NY where the bitchy upper crust and the hot artsy type meet.
Yes, this is exactly what will happen. Just think of it like pricking a hole in a balloon, next thing you know we are 'ppttthhhhhhhhhh' on our way to Jupiter.
That's fine, as long as we don't try to land on Europa.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
If you do, then you should review some basic physics concepts. The pressure differential that exists between the water on top of the ocean and at the bottom would also exist between the bottom of the pipe and the top. So you would have exactly the same level of water inside your straw, as you would outside. Just like in a bottle of Coke or something. Putting one end of the straw at the bottom of the bottle doesn't cause the soda to come shooting out the other end towards your face (although it would be funny if it did, wouldn't it?).
The only exception is if you were to lower the 'straw' down while filled with air (by keeping the top closed and equalizing the pressure against the water using compressed air) and then when you got down to the desired depth, releasing the cap on top -- this would cause water to rush in the bottom to equalize the fluid levels between the inside and outside of the pipe. If the differential is big enough it may in fact be moving quickly enough to 'overshoot' the water level of the ocean and come out the top of the pipe, but this is temporary only -- the steady state solution is with both fluid levels equal.
If you don't believe me, go get a clear straw and a glass of water and come back when you've tried it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
There was no shock! It was a local ground wave, not an earthquake. There may have been slight aftershocks at the site, as rock caved in to the hole generated by the blast. There were no earthquakes, and no tectonic activity - the blast was 5 megatons, which is absolutely negligible compared to the energy in even the smallest quake.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
Well, big bombs will open cracks, but these are nothing on the scale of tectonic events.
I have not seen the film, but I don't rate a single movie narrated by William Shatner as a definitive source of scientific information. It may be true, but I don't consider that useful evidence.
and 80% of that is profits, when it costs $3 to dig oil in iraq and sell it for $55.
Now the average cost is probably more in the $10-$15 range.
So where does all this money go ? an amazing 1.4 trillion dollars???
Well... just like a cool movie plot lets follow.
1. Dig and pull out lots of oil in the middle east etc...
2. Sell it on the market for US DOLLARS
3. The buyer needs US DOLLARS, so they source it, buy it or sell current bonds whatever assets they have.
4. The US DOLLARS then go to the middle east companies/governments in the billions yearly
5. What to do with tonnes of cash, its pretty useless. (wish i had that problem), you invest it in something secure, ie buy US Tbills/Bonds so the cash goes back to USA
6. Billions of cash gets sent to USA
7. USA then uses that cash to "LIVE" on a daily basis and pay debts , ie rates on the tbills/bonds.
So its a vicious circle, money going out of usa, to the east, then back to usa, repeat and rince.
The high price of oil is really whats keeping USA alive, without it, mega cheap oil would not bring in much cash ($400billion yearly) to fund usa's terminal corpse on life support. So basically half the world is funding usa's debt problems, or at least helping it keep a float by rotating credit. Its like a fission reactor, if you reduce the cooling its going to go thermal fast, ie mega inflation/rates for all.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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Way to skim over my post and the grandparent's post and miss what I was commenting on previously. My last post was in repsonse to the statement "The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon". I don't think that's true if the balloon wants to pop when you stab it with something. An uninflated balloon is the only kind with equal pressure inside and out.
3.2 km drilling for seismic research.
They have finished phase one at 10,000 ft.
They have been posting news regularly from phase 1
--keith
No. It could be much worse. They could let the air out of the center of the earth, and it might pop. Even worse, it could jet around the solar system in wild arcs, making farting noises while all the other planets laugh and throw half-eaten cupcakes at eachother.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Better watch out! Their experiments might stop the Earth's spin and we'll lose our magnetic fields!!!