Ocean Floor Crust Wound to Be Explored

eldavojohn writes "A group of scientists are disembarking right now to study an open gash in the ocean floor where earth's mantle lays exposed without any crust covering it. The scientists describe this as the result of the mantle moving too quickly for the crust to keep up. Either that, or the mantle was never covered by the crust and just has always been like this. From the article, 'Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.'"

Comments

Analogy

[Renfield Spiffioso]

MacLeod likens this process to stretching a person's skin until it ruptures, exposing the flesh underneath. That's the most horrifying scientific analogy I've ever heard.

Re:Mid atlantic ridge?

[Mr2cents]

A few months ago I was wondering how deep mankind has drilled, and found some interesting stuff. Basically, you should read "barely" as "didn't".

As always, when you think something's easy (make_small_hole(); while(1) { make_hole_deeper(); } ), it's just because your ignorance doesn't let you appreciate the problems, like the extreme temperature and pressure. For example, I didn't realize that the pressure compresses the rocks and when you drill a hole that deep, the rocks around it want to expand, causing engineering nightmares.

And while measuring the straightness of a hole seems quite doable (or put otherwise, I accept the assumption that there exists technology to do that), I still wonder how they can adjust the drilling direction.

Fascinating!

Re:Wait, what?

[ElectricRook]

Mantle rock is not magma. Mantle material is usually very hot because it is (A) very heavy, and (B) usually covered by a layer of insulating lighter crust material. The crust is 3-18 miles thick. Magma is usually crust material that got pushed down into hot mantle material and melted. The crustal material magma being lighter than mantle wants to rise above the mantle magma. So usually we have an intrusion of lighter crustal magma being forced through the mantle. So we've never seen mantle material exposed before. Some small samples of solid mantle material have been carried up by some of the cooler type volcanoes. This is how we get diamonds and peridots. Read about Kimberlite pipes.