Journey Towards The Center of the Earth

linumax wrote to mention an article detailing an ambitious Japanese-led voyage towards the center of the earth. From the article: "The deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu made a port call Thursday in Yokohama after ending its first training mission at sea since being built in July at a cost of 500 million dollars. The 57,500-ton Chikyu, which means the Earth in Japanese, is scheduled to embark in September 2007 on a voyage to collect the first samples of the Earth's mantle in human history. The project, led by Japan and the United States with the participation of China and the European Union, seeks clues on primitive organisms that were the forerunners of life and on the tectonic plates that shake the planet's foundations" They also hope to use the information to detect earthquakes more accurately. A 4 page PDF presentation about the Chikyu deep-sea drilling vessel is also available."

Comments

ANWR oil is a stop-gap measure at best...

[guygee]

Let's break down your mythology. Even if we started today, ANWR production would probably take 10 years to come to peak production of about 1 M barrels/day. Current U.S. consumption is 20 M barrels/day, projected to rise to above 25 M barrels/day before 2020. Total estimated reserves in ANWR vary wildly, but it is most certainly much more expensive to extract than most OPEC sources. For example, from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/anwar.html

"The companies that want to get at that oil estimate there's 16 billion barrels waiting to be pumped south - or about 30 years worth of Middle East oil imports. U.S. government geologists have estimated a likely reserve of perhaps 10.4 billion barrels in the 700,000-hectare coastal plain region at the northern end of the ANWR. That's the only part of the refuge where the U.S. government has considered lifting the ban on development.

But it would be economically feasible to pump out only a fraction of that reserve. A 1998 study estimated that about 1.9 billion barrels could be recovered at a price of $24 per barrel. Environmentalists and other opponents of opening the area to oil exploration argue there's no way to know how much oil is there.

The Union of Concerned Scientists suggests there may be enough oil to fuel vehicles in the United States for six months. It argues that making vehicles more fuel-efficient will save far more oil than Alaska could ever produce."

Compare this to current Saudi oil production costs of $1-$2/barrel

Just do the math. The economically extractable oil would only last about five year before depletion, at the peak production rate, supplying only a small fraction of our needs.

Messed-Up HTML

[kmactane]

What's up with the screwy HTML in the submission? It looks like someone completely forgot to close an <a> tag, and yet it got posted like this anyway. Did Zonk not notice this before approving the post? Or are Slashdot editors deliberately approving ugly, messed-up stuff just to try to drive us nuts?

Either way, it just plain looks baaad.

Please don't wake Cthulhu!

[Zhe Mappel]

Dude's having this totally awesome dream about the Olsen twins.