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Drilling to the Center of the Earth
indylaw writes "Japanese scientists are attempting to explore the centre of the Earth." From the article: "Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below. The team wants to retrieve samples from the mantle, six miles down, to learn more about what triggers undersea earthquakes, such as the one off Sumatra that caused the Boxing Day tsunami."
12-25km through the oceanic crust is *not* the centre of the earth.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
This article is very interesting. This article is very interesting.
This sounds awfully risky. I hope Bruce Willis and his team are involved.
Is the drill tip made of unobtanium?
"Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below. Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below." Anyways, what happens when it gets crushed by the huge weight of the ground above it, and how are they going to keep it transmitting data, through the mantel, and in the magma.
I hope they consult Hilary Swank or other well-known Hollywood "terranauts" before they commence all this.
The mantle IS NOWHERE NEAR the center of the earth. More /. titling sensationalism.
Still, drilling even 6 miles down is quite a feat
I even emailed the on duty editor before the article was posted to warn him. I even emailed the on duty editor before the article was posted to warn him.
It's not molten rock in the upper mantle. The article itself says the temperature only gets to about 100 C. Considering how long it takes to get down so far, and the remote location (middle of the pacific ocean) I doubt getting energy from a small hole would be very practical.
AccountKiller
it's not so funny when not only have 10 other people made the joke before you, but you also *explain* it.
1. Build giant probe to drill to the center of the earth
2. Arm the probe with nuclear weapons
3. Hold the world hostage for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS
4. Profit!
...what if there were no rhetorical questions?
Written by Bill Bryson.
About the earth's layers (p216): "... the various layers, using average figures:
From 0 to 40 km (25 mi) is the crust.
From 40 to 400 (250 mi) is the upper mantle.
From 400 to 650 (400 mi) is a transition zone between the upper and lower mantle.
From 650 to 2,700 km (1,700 mi) is the lower mantle.
From 2,700 to 2,890 (1,900 mi) is the "D" layer.
From 2,890 to 5,150 km (3,200 mi) is the outer core,
and from 5,150 to 6,378 km (3,967 mi) is the inner core."
About an attempt to drill the "Mohole" during the 60's (p214)
"Drilling from a ship in open waters is, in the words of one oceanographer, 'like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti.'"
A very cool book.
The power of Christ compiles you!
Perhaps people drilling to the center of the earth is what's causing the tsunamis... Oh the tragic irony that would be!!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
There have been a number of other projects to drill deep into the Earth's crust, though none has succeeded in reaching the mantle, as this Japanese team is trying to do. Some of the more well-known ones:
Another poster already provided the wikipedia page for Project Mohole. That was a US team back in 1961 that managed to drill to 183 m below the sea floor, in 3500 m of water off the Mexican coast. From a ship, floating on the ocean surface -- I just find that incredible.
As far as land-based projects go, there have been 2 big ones that I know of. The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Russian project, started in 1970, that drilled at a site on the Kola Peninsula near Finland. Their deepest hole reached 12.262 km in depth, which is the current record. This page has a section (scroll down a few screens) with some very interesting findings from the project. Apparently, geologic theory doesn't quite correspond with what we find when we actually go down there to see for ourselves.
There's also the KTB (long German acronym) Borehole, started in 1978 in Bavaria. They reached a depth of 9.101 km. Information on this one is hard to find, at least in English, though there is a great Oilfield Review article (big pdf) available.
This Japanese project is going to drill through the sea floor in the Pacific, in a spot where the crust is thin, which will hopefully allow them to reach the mantle in only 7 km, under 2.5 km of water. For comparison: the previous record seafloor drill was only 2.1 km. So they've definitely got their work cut out for them.
I hope they don't wake up some million year old creature that then terrorises Tokyo and makes all the girls scream!
It's the "centre" in the same way that the "centre" of an M&M is a peanut.
Apparently, the Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so if ever they drilled down to the core, it would heat up the planet.
It wouldn't have time to "heat up the planet (surface)", even if it was significant, which it isn't, since volcanoes already do the same job on much larger scale. Any such drill hole that isn't actively kept open would instantly close either because pressure pushed the rock walls together, or if they go deep enough, magma would go up, cool, and form a cork.
The solid crust not only prevents such convection events, but is also a poor thermal conductor.
There's a reason the solid crust is where it is, just drilling a small hole in it doesn't cause a permanent dent in it.
It's a good thing though, they would open up a gate to hell if they went that deep.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
To be pedantic, the mantle does not go all the way to the center. There's the core below the mantle. To extend your analogy, the crust is the M&M's chocolate shell, the mantle is the chocolate below that, and the core is the peanut.
Infuriate left and right
This is serious. Somebody should stop them. Otherwise, they will pop the planet like a balloon, causing the insides to gush out into space, and the Earth's crust to fragment and fly off in all directions. Those parts of the crust left intact will shrink to a small fraction of their former size (just like a ballon's skin), once the air is let out of the Earth. On the plus side, traveling from point A to point B will take much less time, once the crust has shrunk, but point A and point B will themselves be much smaller. Houses in the suburbs will start to look like houses in the city, i.e., scrunched up against each other with small to non-existent back yards. No back yards! Where will yuppies hold their barbeques? My god, my god! We have to stop them before they pop the planet!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Why don't you back that up with somne figures? I can't be botherd to spend the time to refute it, but my feeling is that you could "drain" all the energy we could feasibly use for millions of years with negligible effect. Much less effect than fossil fuels certainly. Actually, if we survive a century or two at most we'll have something better like fusion.
Specific heat of Nickel/Iron 440j/(kg-K)
Temp ~6000K
Density of Iron 7800kg/m^3, Nickel 8900km/m^3
Diameter of outer core ~5000km
Mass of core = 5*10^24 kg, less than the mass of earth = 5.97*10^24
Heat content of core = 12*10^33 J, which combined with this data of 12 trillion kwh electricity usage/year = 43*10^18 J/year gives us over a billion years to drain it 1%, well past the life of our planet.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.