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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."
Gee, better be on the lookout for green slime and primords....
R David Francis
They say that the Actic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska would be a perfect place to drill through to the mantle, since oil offers so little resistance and simultaniously lubricates the bit. And what harm will come if a bunch of it happens to flow up to the surface by accident?
Neo-Darwinist heathens! There is only ONE "forerunner" of life on this planet, and that's GOD!
/.: why the hell am I here?
Ever see a pop can with a small hole in it? I mean, do they really have a clue what might happen if they provide a channel for deep magma flows to rise? Sure, it's a little sci-fi doomsday scenario, but I'd hate to be the one who signed off on the risk assessment for this project.
Scientist 1: Hey, Jimmie, remember that movie we saw when we were kids? The one where they go to the center of the earth?
Scientist 2: Sure, why'dya ask?
Scientist 1: I got this reasearch grant and I thought we could drill down to see if those giant mushrooms were real.
Scientest 2: Sure, I'm in.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That drill is going to make about 0.1% of the way.
...digging from Japan, it looks like they'll come out off the coast of Uruguay (cool Google maps hack shows you where you will come out if you dig a hole through the center of the earth from any location).
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
Mantle rock consists of olivines, different pyroxenes and other mafic minerals. Typified by peridotite, dunite, and eclogite, mantle rocks also possesses a higher portion of iron and magnesium and a smaller portion of silicon and aluminium than the crust. In the mantle, temperatures range between 100C at the upper boundary to over 3,500C at the boundary with the core. Although these temperatures far exceed the melting points of the mantle rocks at the surface, particularly in deeper ranges, they are almost exclusively solid. The enormous lithostatic pressure exerted on the mantle prevents them from melting.
Given the existence of chemosynthetic life at ocean ridge hotspots, I wonder about the potential for life in the mantle. Surely the continuing convection in the mantle and subduction zones provides the potential for non-equilibrium chemical reactions that could be a basis for life. Perhaps some form of complex aluminosilicate chains/matrix or semi-crystalline blebs could form the basis for non-carbon-based life. I'm not expecting anything particularly mobile or obvous (a la the silcon-based Horta in Star Trek) but as long as a region supports both solid-phase and liquid-phase complex mixtures, then it seems life isn't impossible. Perhaps xenoliths are the corpolites or decomposed remnants of something down there.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This may be slightly off-topic. but it seems to me that if we improve drilling technology enough to breach the Earth's Mantle, there lies an almost endless supply of heat energy. According to http://zebu.uoregon.edu/ph162/l18.html, the average thermal gradient is 30 degrees C per kilometer, so that at a depth of 20,000 feet, the temperature is 190 degrees C. The problem is that in solids the heat can only be replenished by diffusion, so that steam extraction of heat would occur faster than the heat can be replenished. However, if we could dig deep enough to where heat could be replenished by convection, then the concept of geothermal heat extraction could be feasible.
Another alternative that may currently be feasible is to detonate small H-bombs in deep cavities to replenish the heat. This, in fact, was already done in the PACER project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACER. The major problem in the Pacer project was the reliance of plutonium fission bombs to initiate the fusion reaction, which created problems with radioactive waste. If a "Fusion Fuse" other than fission could be devised, we could dispense with esoteric, far-in-the-future methods of controlling fusion above ground, and simply use deep cavities in the Earth to release heat via uncontrolled fusion reactions, and extract the heat.
Bottom Line: I am not buying into the "Peak Oil Doomsday Scenario" http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html just yet.
I do not deny that this may be true. It is difficult to change cultural attitudes.
An intersting example: I recently watched a documentary on the "Little Ice Age". Between 1300 to around 1900, the climate in Northern Europe and Eastern North America became dramatically colder. Before that time, vineyards in England flourished, and English wine was considered superior to French wine. Cereal grains were the main crop. The Vikings colonized Greenland. But after the climate shift, the crops failed repeatedly, leading to widespread famine. Eventually, the potato was introduced from the Americas. The potato was much better suited to the climatic conditions of the time, but people refused to cultivate it. Priests called it "the devil's root". Eventually, the Germans were the first to adopt the potato, during the 30 years war, but only because the crop could not be burned by invading armies. The French did not adopt the potato, and famines persisted, partially contributing to the French Revolution.
So people suffered and starved for hundreds of years, simply because of their inability to adapt their culture to the changing environment.
Will we do any better?
Sorry to be a party pooper, not a troll though. All this fun about what they might hit is a bit over done. The depth of drilling is 25,000 feet. That is a bad joke. They drill 31,000 feet in South Alabama all the time. They drill nearly 50,000 feet at Petronius 65 miles south of Alabama. What they have hit doesn't in any way resemble the "mantle" and I really doubt this project is ever going close to the "mantle."
This rig might do a somewhat useful drilling of fault zones and it might find other useful things but this isn't likely to be of any use in actual "mantle" research.
The Russians have drilled locations much deeper and attempted to go into the mantle. They hit hot salt water in the rock but nothing resembling the "mantle" that we all have been so rigorously taught to believe exists. Actually so many deep bores of the earth exist around the world that vastly exceed this depth it seems to me almost useless to consider this "research." Maybe we should be considering exactly what the research is actually going to be? I wouldn't hazard a guess but unless the ship is going to bore something like 200,000 feet the prospects of really new research coming from it are dubious. The world is full of holes going down 25,000 feet.
My suspicion is that they will find if they drill fault zones a pretty shocking reality that they knew nothing of what was going on. It would be a fair prediction to estimate that these zones are water penetration zones. The seismic signature of a "diving plate" is probably only a water penetration crack into the rocks below. This would explain the volcanoes and all without any of the subduction or other stuff. Such a discovery would have the science of Geology scratching their heads for a long time. They might discover that the earths plates match (as they do!) in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. They might discover like Yukos found that there is "Magma oil." They might just come up with a bunch of other fun stuff. Again they might not but who knows? It could be a lot of fun watching.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.