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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
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
There's no tampon made than could contain the leak that would create.
Bad Scientists! Bad!
+6 energy
WARNING: Significant negative ecological impact
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!!!!
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.
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.
...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
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.
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!"
Don't forget the hole's only natural enemy is the pile
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Unlikely. The Mohorovicic (Moho) discontinuity can be described in a few different ways - either where seismic veolocities have a marked discontinuity, or where a noticable chemical/mineralogical change occurs (can't remember what it is, I'm a geophysicist, not a geologist). What it's not is a boundary between a nice solid crust floating on top of "firey liquid mantle". In fact more accurate terms are lithosphere and asthenosphere, rather than crust and mantle, which basically differentiate between rigid, colder material, and warmer, more ductile rock. The top of the mantle is still solid, but becomes increasingly ductile with depth. Various minerals reach melting point as you go down towards the Core-Mantle Boundary, but basically I think you have to get to the outer core before it's all liquid (mostly iron). In terms of energies, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was about 55-60 megatonnes (depending on who you ask), in 1961 by the USSR. The energy released by the great 1960 Chilean earthquake (the largest recorded in the last 100 years) was equivalent approximately to a 2000 Mt bomb. So, setting off a nuke at the moho might temporarily create a small spherical cavity which would probably collapse in on itself, and maybe create some melt, but it's doubtful it would come gushing to the surface as a raging plume of "liquid hot magma". Besides, there have been plenty of underground nuclear tests, and none of those have resulted in a humungous volcano. As yet. The USGS site at http://www.usgs.gov/ is probably a good place to find out more.
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??!
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.
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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.
Drilling two miles isn't that hard and has certainly been done before. The deepest drill hole on land goes down some 12 km.
But this isn't the same thing. This is trying to drill down 3+ km below the bottom of the Atlantic. In this case the drilling starts under 750 m of water (and only because Atlantis Massif is a relatively high spot on the sea floor). The mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic is their target because it has some of the shallowest Moho in the world. To reach the Moho from a continental section you would probably have to drill 25 km or more even with a good choice of location.
"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.
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.
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IANQAG (I am not quite a geologist), but I am just finishing up my minor in Geology, and considering it as a second major.
Unlikely. The Mohorovicic (Moho) discontinuity can be described in a few different ways - either where seismic veolocities have a marked discontinuity, or where a noticable chemical/mineralogical change occurs (can't remember what it is, I'm a geophysicist, not a geologist).
Seismic discontinuity.
Anyway, regarding the grandparent... in theory, the only thing keeping the mantle from melting is pressure (phase diagrams are easy to find). When you drill down, if you don't maintain pressure in the well, (again, in theory) you might be able to relieve the pressure on mantle rock and cause it to melt. Of course, you'd need a really big hole for the resulting magma to come up before it plugs itself like a puncture wound.
Making an artificial volcano is a highly unlikely thing to accomplish, either on accident or on purpose.
I've read one theory about the yellowstone hotspot that is related to this. David Alt and Donald Hyndman believe (found in _Roadside Geology of Idaho_) that a meteorite struck the pacific northwest and the impact crater relieved pressure on the mantle, allowing the magma to well up. This, of course, relieved pressure below and caused further upwelling. Each eruption of what is now the Yellowstone hot spot keeps the cycle going, they claim.
I don't think it's a very probable explanation, and it doesn't seem to be easily verifiable or falsifiable, since the original evidence would have been destroyed by the volcanic eruptions.
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