Journey To the Mantle of the Earth By 2020

An anonymous reader writes "A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth's mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say."

Comments

Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[elrous0]

But how could we have known that's where those alien microbes were? God help us, HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN!?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[chemicaldave]

In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anrego]

It’s actually funny, with all the wars and nuclear weapons and pandemic fears and asteroids and climate change, I actually think this is how the human race is going to destroy itself.

Not specifically this experiment, but something like it. It’s gonna be some scientist or team of scientists playing with something a little out of his/her/their understanding who will accidently split the Earth in half, or ignite the atmosphere, or boil the oceans, or unleash some virus/toxin or something!

But we can’t just stop scientific research either. Stuff like the LHC and possibly this experiment has to continue. It’s just an interesting thought as we start getting into stuff that actually could have global, irreversible impact.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anrego]

Also.. is this a reference to POD by any chance? :D

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[pushing-robot]

obligatory.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[elrous0]

Not to worry. As long as we have Christian Bale to lead us, we'll survive.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[ElectricTurtle]

As much as people love to get worked up about doomsday science, I think the only real credible threats are grey goo and malevolent strong AI, and both of those things are probably at least another generation or two away.

There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune. The energy involved in achieving any kind of planetary effects is for all intents and purposes currently impossible to produce, and if H bombs didn't ignite the atmosphere, what, if anything, could?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[hesaigo999ca]

Well, that or, GOD HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN THAT BY MAKING SUCH A HOLE INTO THE CRUST WE WOULD HAVE RELEASED UN UNCONTROLLABLE AMOUNT OF LAVA AND COMPLETELY DISRUPT THE CORES SPIN....or any other type of spin on this you want.....

They could not figure out how to contain the oil spill in the gulf of mexico, making it the worst oil disaster in history, and it was not even a spill, it was just a tube that in the end needed to be capped, and now they want to make a hole, where lava can spew out, where absolutely nothing will be able to contain it, able to withstand that heat, as oil spill was just oil, no heat to contend with....

I just see this as REALLY, WE REALLY NEED TO SPEND ALL THIS MONEY JUST TO MAKE A HOLE AND SAY SEE WHAT I DID, I MADE A HOLE... NOW LETS LOOK INSIDE...

Sounds to me like a stupid teenager that needs to have a body piercing because they can, until later in life they realize what a waste that was....but oh well, go get the Armageddon gear out of my closet I guess

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Dunbal]

Hah - don't worry. The only thing the LHC is destroying is budgets, deadlines and large sums of money.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[WrongSizeGlass]

But how could we have known that's where those alien microbes were? God help us, HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN!?

I guess we could have just listened to the Scientologists.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[MickyTheIdiot]

What about one of the greatest Dr. Who serials ever: Inferno.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mark-t]

What would tend to happen is that as they drill the hole, lava starts climbing up the shaft and cooling again into solid rock. Even once they are all the way through, the lava will still quickly cool into rock as it comes onto the surface.

Ultimately, it would amount to becoming a man-made volcano... one that would probably take several centuries before it was of any significant size, and that's assuming that it remains active for that amount of time.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[blueg3]

If there are microbes living in the mantle, they're probably not alien.

Still might eat your face, though.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Dunbal]

where lava can spew out

Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how about we drill it into the Yellowstone super caldera and allow it to release the pressure so that we don't get that big old explosion that is supposed to happen?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[olsmeister]

Yeah. As long as a few tens of thousands of people survive, we'll be O-TAY.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[ElectricTurtle]

I'm not sure if you and those of like mind responding are seriously stupid or just trolling. Volcanoes have been doing this as long as the earth has had a crust. It's not going to do anything to 'core spin' or cause some unstoppable lava flow. It's not like the earth is a fucking water balloon that's going to pop as soon as somebody pokes it with a pin.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Zontar The Mindless]

ObYouTubeLink (IN TECHNICOLOR®)

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the mantle is not molten lava like at a volcano...it's highly viscous rock that is more solid than liquid. The lava you're thinking of only occurs where there are "mantle plumes" that are more melty than the surrounding mantle, heated by the outer core.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[denzacar]

Gerard Butler will have to remain behind to die though. Again.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Dunbal]

OK - I'm not a geologist. Still I assume that stuff must be pretty darned hot...

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[RoverDaddy]

Yet another fictional account of the same thing: Thank God It's Only A Motion Picture

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

That's why we NEED to get the fuck off this rock! Start sending people to mars and start laying the groundwork for colonization/terraforming. Start building large rotating space stations where people can live permenantly. And launch ourselves even further out from there.

The only way the human race is going to survive is if we aren't all in one place. If we don't do it to ourselves, then it will be some natural disaster like an asteroid.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[osu-neko]

If it was that easy to split the planet in half, or ignite the atmosphere, or whatever, it would have happened long before we came along.

Now, a genetically engineered virus or something might have some potential here... but really, there's no reason to think even that's realistically possible. I mean, a deadly virus is certainly possible, but one that entirely destroys the species is highly unlikely. Even the most virulent plagues in history have never even made the halfway mark. A 100% kill is absurdly unlikely. One that kills billions, certainly within the realm of possibility, but one that kills everyone isn't really, not even if it was specifically designed to do so by nihilistic terrorists or something. As an accidental discovery, much less likely still.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Zcar]

where lava can spew out

Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...

Not really.

1) The temperature of the upper mantle, near the boundary with the crust, is in the neighborhood of 750C/1400F. I think we can design sensors to handle these temperatures.

2) The mantle is mostly solid, not liquid. And even where it's not "solid", for most practical purposes you'd have a hard time telling it from solid..

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[MagikSlinger]

Yeah, it's hot, but it's not going to go shooting up the borehole. It will plastically deform into the borehole and eventually form an intrusion and probably become granite. The only time you could get a volcanic event is if you hit a mantle plume (as mentioned above by AC). In which case, the lava will freeze when it hits the drilling mud plugging itself back up.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[g0bshiTe]

Obligatory Slaughterhouse 5 quote "He has always pushed the button, and he always will. We have always let him push it, and we always will."

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[scubamage]

There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out. Even in the middle of some of the worst of plagues some people were immune.

True, Madagascar will close its borders at the first sign of trouble. /pandemic joke

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[scubamage]

I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. The voice of insanity was getting a bit shrill there for a moment.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[scubamage]

It is, but the earth above it is cooler so it should cool before it hits the top. Operative word: should. My bigger concern would be hitting large pockets of gas.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[osu-neko]

Grey goo isn't really a credible threat either. Somehow you start talking nanotechnology and people imagine magical machines capable of operating and replicating without regard to basic principles of conservation of energy and so on. Self-replicating machines will quickly bump into the same limits that naturally occuring self-replicating life forms do, and unlike machines we design, things like bacteria have no interest in limiting themselves -- they'd happily become the grey goo that takes over the planet if they could. But they don't, because it's not realistically possible.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[MozeeToby]

Grey goo isn't much of a threat anyway, if it were fire would have done the job a long time ago. There isn't enough energy that is easily obtained (especially by a machine in the nano size range) to go around tearing apart the component molecules on any random object and reassembling them into more copies. And even if there were enough energy, similar machines that tear apart the component molecules but don't reassemble them are always going to be an order of magnitude more efficient, meaning all you need is a ready supply of such machines to spray all over the grey goo.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[sensei moreh]

I (and, I dare say, most other igneous petrologists), for one will be extremely surprised if it becomes granite (or even rhyolite).

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mldi]

There are certain geological ingredients required to create a volcano. Simply drilling a little hole won't do it.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Chemisor]

Just drill a little deeper, Lews Therin, and you will reach the true source. It is your only salvation.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[penguin_dance]

Well...being that we've given up on the space program we might as well go to hell....

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[stiggle]

We seem to think its OK to try and keep animal species going with only a few hundred pairs (and less in some cases).

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[ColdWetDog]

There are certain geological ingredients required to create a volcano. Simply drilling a little hole won't do it.

Damn. There goes that idea. Back to the thermite.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[stiggle]

Well...
"The Day the Earth Caught Fire" (1961) was simultaneous nuclear test detonations.
"Crack in the World" (1965) was searching for geothermal energy sources.

I love 60's disaster movies.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[MagikSlinger]

I humbly accept your correction. :-) Would mantle become basalt if quickly cooled?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[tehcyder]

I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.

You just need two. It says so in the bible.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

If they have perfect DNA, yeah. It takes a few generations for the mutations to stack up.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mark-t]

True... but I was assuming worst-case scenario for the sake of argument.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mswhippingboy]

But what if they discover the core is really hollow and all the water in all the oceans drains into the hole? What then?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[sensei moreh]

A (quickly-cooled) sample from the uppermost mantle taken immediately beneath the oceanic crust would be pretty similar to basalt - as you go deeper, the composition would change to something quite unlike the igneous rocks you normally see at the surface of the earth.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[rgbatduke]

There is actually a very simple argument from thermodynamics and/or statistical mechanics that this will not happen. No matter what you think that we might do -- drill down to the Earth's mantle, for example, or build a super-accelerator capable of extremely energetic collisions -- Nature does it first, and does it all of the time. For example, asteroids have drilled down to the Earth's mantle in the past, and volcanoes do it in the present. Galactic Cosmic Rays with energies greater than anything we can imagine creating in an accelerator happen all of the time -- the most powerful one observed so far is (IIRC) a proton with roughly the same kinetic energy as a baseball travelling at 90 mph. People worried that the first nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere and turn the world into a short-lived sun, ignoring the fact that temperatures and pressures well in excess of nuclear bomb temperatures occur in both the GCR events and in asteroid impacts -- if such a thing were possible, it would have already happened long ago.

So you are actually probably pretty safe from most things like this that we might do. Even a global thermonuclear war (which is no longer terribly likely, at least at this time, politically) is very unlikely to kill off all of humanity. Nature, however, could easily produce a pandemic killer bug without our help. Or a nearby sun (including our own) could almost casually snuff out the human race in a matter of minutes. Or a really big rock could fall and manage it. There are a few "plausible" extinction/doomsday scenarios, if by plausible you mean things that could cause it are known to happen somewhere in the Universe and could do the job, but none of them are terribly likely on a timescale of a few million years at this point in the natural evolution of our solar system and our biosphere. They are, if anything, less likely as time goes by -- a pandemic that might have been (nearly) universally fatal three hundred years ago would probably not be today, between our knowledge of the causes of disease and our ability to produce remedies and or quarantines that would very likely contain it.

In a nutshell, we probably won't "destroy ourselves", but if we really want the human species to survive in the long run, we do need to move off of planet Earth and out into the Universe at large -- events likely to wipe out all life on Earth are rather likely to be confined to Earth or local Galactic environments until we hit deadlines like the Big Crunch or the Big Freeze. By which time, singularity or not, we'll both likely be dead...

rgb

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[ElectricTurtle]

The difference of course being that bacteria die, and each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in. So while there are temperate bacteria and extromophile bacteria that can live in the arctic or thermal vents, they can't be transplanted between those conditions.

Further, and this is almost more important, bacteria and other microorganisms as well as plants and animals live in a de facto equilibrium. Yes, it's not the result of self imposed limits, but it is the result of each species struggling against each other for resources in its given niche, and while some species might get a little ahead of others over time, natural selection does not, as a matter of its function, hand a species an atomic bomb from out of nowhere. The closest thing to that in nature was the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Siderian period, and that killed most of the lifeforms which existed before that time.

The point is that organic life is not prepared to contend with artificial life for resources. Even the most advanced animal predator is not going to best a main battle tank, and at a microorganism level that's exactly the sort of competition that would exist between bacteria and self-replicating nanomachines.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Teun]

A volcano exists thanks to a particular diameter to depth/length relation of it's 'hole' or central vent.

Would it be wider large areas would be consumed but the pressure would be negligent, would it be narrower the lava would have cooled down and solidified well before reaching surface.

A bore hole is extremely narrow, at these depths a typical diameter of a few inches only and the lava's viscosity would increase the moment it would start to rise, solidifying and plugging the hole before getting anywhere near surface.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Teun]

Hitting large pockets of gas would not be a concern but a bonus.

Knowing rig owners they'll have a BOP in place when drilling at suspect depths.

Besides, it's not operated by BP :)

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[phaggood]

Then tell all your Facebook friends to tell all *their* Facebook friends to sign over this year's tax-refund check to Chang-Diaz to fund his Vasimir engine that will take us all to the solar system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[bigrockpeltr]

the definition of a volcano when i was at school was a hole in the earth's crust through which magma rises. everything else are just features.
So in my book, drilling a hole in the crust would almost certainly (almost because it hasnt been done yet) release pressure and cause magma to rise to the surface. And there you gave birth to a volcano.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

I'm not on Facebook.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

... a man-made volcano...

That sounds so incredibly bad ass. How can anyone NOT be pumped up for this? That's an inspirational and technically challenging accomplishment on par with the moon landing for us evil scientists.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[onepoint]

the bible says a lot of things, but does that make it correct?

I'm going to bet with science on this and say at lease 20 mating pairs
in a non-hostile environment ( omni magazine around 1992ish i think )

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[onepoint]

I guess it's a big Sushi party till we run out.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

But without a mantle plume to fuel it, it won't last. Also, with a 6" diameter (or however big) borehole the magma will cool too fast to reach the surface before it freezes back up.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

oh god you're stupid...

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Cyno01]

Doesnt always work, IIRC modern cheetahs are runts compared to hundreds of years ago due to a lack of genetic diversity from when they were nearly hunted to extinction.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[guspasho]

We're going to destroy ourselves with asteroids?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[guspasho]

I'm already in the solar system.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Scientists should only experiment on things they have total understanding of and can provide explicit outcome data before they run the experiment.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[drsmithy]

There is too much genetic diversity and geographic separation of human populations for a virus to wipe them all out.

It doesn't need to wipe us all out to be effectively game over. Kill enough people that the remaining groups are longer self-sustaining, or kill enough that operating the machinery that makes modern life possible is no longer feasible (say, throwing us all back to pre-industrial revolution levels), and for all practical purposes humanity is dead.

With that said I don't think such a pandemic could occur naturally. Weaponised viruses, on the other hand, are a different story.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[ElectricTurtle]

Preindustrial human society might have been relatively uncomfortable, inconvenient, and logistically disconnected, but it was by no means dead. Given that there are tribes in South America that are self-sustaining at a population of dozens to hundreds, that really isn't a valid concern either. According to Lynn Jorde and Henry Harpending's genetic research, the entire population of modern humans was at one time less than ten thousand primarily due to the huge environmental distress caused by the Toba eruption. Using these figures as precedents, as much as 99.99999% of the current human population could be killed and there would still be the possibility of recovery. Humans are resilient motherfuckers. They can survive virtually anywhere and eat virtually anything.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Hatta]

Anthropogenic climate change is a much more plausible doomsday scenario than either grey goo or AI.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[pushing-robot]

Before you give humans too much credit for their ingenuity, the main reason machines perform so well is because they are not organisms. In a sense, a battle tank is like a single organ; very effective at a task but incapable of existing without a greater body. The tank has mines to produce steel, titanium and depleted uranium, refineries to produce jet fuel, factories to build it, ships to transport it, people to operate it, and heavy equipment to get it out of any mud and ditches it happens across. Tanks are not capable of homeostasis, adaptation, growth, or reproduction, and even if they were they could not acquire enough resources to sustain their energy budget.

When you've built a tank that can repair itself, operate itself, reproduce itself, adapt to new environments, and is built from and powered by materials it scavenged and assembled from its environment, then we'll see how fearsome our technology is.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mangu]

I actually saw a pretty cool article about this some time ago; what is the minimum needed number of people to keep the species going without causing inter-marriage and inter-breeding to cause defects. I wish I could find it.

You just need two. It says so in the bible.

With this important restriction: those two must be one of each sex.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mangu]

each species thereof has a specific and usually very limited environmental range that it can operate in

Because that specialization is beneficial to the organism. A generic organism, capable of surviving in any environment, would be less efficient in any of those environments than a specialist organism.

That's generally true for any system, living or not. For instance, the military sometimes use amphibious vehicles, which are capable of running both on water and on land. Apart from that flexibility, those vehicles have no advantage over specialized vehicles, boats and cars, that are capable only of running on water or land.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Algae_94]

Although artificial life wouldn't die of old age, it can still die from injuries or hostile environments. Bacteria and other microscopic organisms are highly adaptable. It is entirely likely that a strain could develop that excretes some sort of highly acidic or otherwise damaging chemical which would attack artificial life. It's possible that breaking down artificial life would serve as nutrients for microorganisms as well. There are just too many remarkably clever adaptations that have occurred in nature to not give it a fighting chance against a nanomachine that self replicates.

This isn't to say that there wouldn't be massive changes in existing species or mass extinctions, but I think natural life as a whole would survive.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Algae_94]

It sounds like you need to reassess what your definition of humanity is. Humanity is not intimately linked to post-industrial revolution technology. There are countless ideas, thoughts and accomplishments that occurred well before the 19th century. Are these not part of humanity?

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[kvezach]

They're going to drill a hole in the dark one's prison! This thing is the Bore! AIEEEE!

Or something.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[jc42]

In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.

Actually, few biologists would be surprised. One of the more interesting things about previous deep-drilling projects is that they've turned up micro-organisms all the way down. Projecting the microbe count from these holes has produced the estimate that there is more biomass inside the planet than on its surface and in the oceans. Of course, this is based on a very small sample, so nobody takes it too seriously.

But still, the fact that we've found living things everywhere we've drilled means that the default assumption should be that we'll keep finding them. Presumably it'll get too hot for life at some depth, but so far we have no clue at all what this depth might be. The really significant thing would be if we found no decrease in the density of microbes at any depth.

And I don't think the critters down there qualify as "alien". From the few samples that've been studied, they are very similar to the things living inside rocks near the surface. We might have to go to other planets to find something truly alien. And maybe the things living inside the other planets will turn out to be relatives of the things living here.

For further information, ask google about "deep-rock microorganisms" (without the quotes). There's quite a bit of information on the subject online.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Criminy, I can't remember any movie demonizing nuclear power like that in the Cold War era. By this I don't mean the neverending stream of flicks painting various pictures of WWIII and its aftermath. "O Holy Bomb" etc. Even those guys on the Ape Planet were mutated from hanging around a warhead, not a corroded reactor or a waste dump.

"You'll thank God it's only a motion picture." How often do we find ourselves saying that.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[BitZtream]

We don't think its 'Ok', its just all we've got to work with in some cases. White Rhinos were gone in the wild as far as we could tell at one point, so a family of them, with a couple of breeding females (all related) were released into the wild in the hope that they would recover.

As long as they can breed just a couple times each, the population can recover. The effects of breeding with ones relations do not carry forward for too many generations before the recovery is complete, and you only need to get about to a second cousin before it ceases to matter anyway.

The reality of it is, while we know for a fact that many species have come and gone, most people today can't accept that it is going to happen right in front of our eyes.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[BitZtream]

Not really, several species can change gender if the population is thrown too far off.

One of the things that Jurassic Park got right was ... Life WILL find a way to go on, maybe not every species, but Life will succeed.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[polymeris]

I am not an expert, but wouldn't it take a long time to raise through the thin borehole and rather become some sort of intrusive mafic rock, gabbro, perhaps? I understand most of the oceanic crust is composed of that igneous rock.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

geologic dike - Google Image Search. Some of these aren't much larger than a typical deep man made bore - but they contracted massively after cooling, as I understand these things.

This whole endeavor will likely remain on the drawing board, too; the expected cost is ca. $1 billion, largely from Japanese sources - a double whammy given the state of that country at the moment. It's baffling to me that anyone is even considering this - after an early 90s earthquake in western Oregon two scientific boreholes were drilled in the area, to the staggering depth of 750m. Fossil fuel exploratory wells start at about 3.5k feet, and data from those have been crucial to our understanding of conditions in the subsurface; but far as I know dedicated deep scientific wells are comparatively rare. Maybe the Japanese are just more gung ho for this knowledge than the US? Or we've punched so many holes in the ground it's considered unnecessary.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[polymeris]

1) The temperature of the upper mantle, near the boundary with the crust, is in the neighborhood of 750C/1400F.

TFA talks about 300C, and says that could be a problem. They don't say what their estimations of pressure are, but I think at that temperature, whatever rock they reach, is definitely going to be solid.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[hesaigo999ca]

Earth's mantle, isn't this way past the first crust....? Something tells me the lava that flows under the crust is not the same as the stuff that is closer to the core, but then again I am no scientist am I, I may be just seriously stupid or just a troll

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[hesaigo999ca]

Most of the mantle is not molten lava like at a volcano...it's highly viscous rock that is more solid than liquid. The lava you're thinking of only occurs where there are "mantle plumes" that are more melty than the surrounding mantle, heated by the outer core.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[vldragon]

yeah, you have to add baking soda too...

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the cobalt bomb idea is a feasible planet-killer, although that's also debatable, and only available on the necessary scale to superpowers. Still, they should be able to kill more than just about any evolved (natural) microorganism or not-intentionally-dirty nuclear weapons.

I don't know if you count an engineered microorganisms as grey goo, but they also aren't subject to the kind of evolutionary guidance that prevents 100% lethality. Either nanomachines or engineered microorganisms, if you distinguish between them, could be designed to be sufficiently virulent and fatal, but with an unnaturally long incubation period, that they could kill nearly everyone with high probability. (Literal grey goo seems like less of a threat than specifically targeted genocidal goo. Total available energy arguments can't stop the latter.)

Although, as you say, that technology is decades off.

None of these things are likely to kill every single human on the planet, though. Engineers (bio- or nano-) can't think of everything, and who knows what the 10-sigma radiation resistance of some freakish humans might be. Still, these are all pretty bad scenarios compared to the mere global thermonuclear holocaust that kept me up at night as a kid.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[BitZtream]

Without significant amounts of water in the magma it won't go anywhere worth mentioning.

Volcanos typically form where the crust is splitting apart on its own, allowing it to reach the surface because its got a crack to flow through ... OR where water has been brought into magma via subduction causing the pressure to rise abnormally due to steam formation and the lava to be much less viscous.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[nu1x]

"a tank that can repair itself, operate itself, reproduce itself, adapt to new environments, and is built from and powered by materials it scavenged and assembled from its environment"

All except reproduction, read a very absorbing book "Cemetery World" by Clifford D. Simak, one of my favorite authors ever.... Ahh good times.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

"In a nutshell, we probably won't "destroy ourselves", but if we really want the human species to survive in the long run, we do need to move off of planet Earth and out into the Universe at large -- events likely to wipe out all life on Earth are rather likely to be confined to Earth or local Galactic environments until we hit deadlines like the Big Crunch or the Big Freeze. By which time, singularity or not, we'll both likely be dead..."

No, we need to stay on Earth and leave the rest of the Universe the fuck alone. Humans fuck up everything they have the chance to come in contact with, we sure as hell don't need mass populations on other planets and bodies in outer space. Earth gets incinerated 5 billion years from now? Well, we'll probably have been long dead to begin with, and if not, it's our time. Let the scientists examine outer space, even send spacecraft out to help learn... but sending people to another planet/moon something that should not be done. They'll just fuck it up.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[sensei moreh]

Actually, thinking about it (which is what I should have done originally), the drill core is unlikely to encounter magma, but rather a coarse-grained rock more-or-less gabbroic rock with the viscosity of rock salt.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Maritz]

There are relatively few things we can do that nature doesn't already do somewhere somehow, it's just that a good experiment controls for other factors and isolates various variables. Out of your scenarios, the virus one is fairly plausible to me. Igniting the atmosphere etc, isn't, because if there was a lower energy state for the atmosphere to occupy, you can be fairly certain that over hundreds of millions of years it would have hit the criteria required to occupy it.

The LHC's mission is a great example of how nature already does these experiments. The gimps who were frothing at the mouth about turning the planet into a black hole or strangelets etc. neglected the fact that galactic cosmic rays strike our atmosphere all the time with particles orders of magnitude more energetic than anything the LHC can come up with in its operational lifetime. The fact that they continued to argue in spite of this shows them up as either idiots or intellectually dishonest ideologues.

The grey goo scenario is one that seems possible and somewhat scary however..! Nanoscale machines that eat the environment and everything its composed of.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[mangu]

several species can change gender if the population is thrown too far off.

Yes, I know, humans can do this, but they are not fertile after the procedure...

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[Maritz]

Plus your second generation are all brothers and sisters. Followed by a cocktail of cousins, nieces, etc... Eew.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[PlusFiveTroll]

Look at the period at the end of this sentence. Now imagine using a drill bit that size to drill in to an Olympic sized swimming pool and trying to drain it.

"the Lava Creek eruption which happened nearly 640,000 years ago,[19] ejected approximately 240 cubic miles (1,000 km3) of rock and dust into the sky."

240 CUBIC FUCKING MILES.

Re:Looking back now, it was a terrible mistake

[jc42]

Actually, if we could start a new volcano, it could get big rather quickly. It wouldn't necessarily take centuries.

Of course, as others have said, a hole of diameter 10 or 20 cm is unlikely to create a volcano. Even with a Deepwater Horizon sort of blowout, the rising magma would cool too rapidly due to contact with crustal rock, blocking the hole.

I wonder if any geophysicists could make a reasonable estimate of how big a hole we'd need to drill to maintain a lava flow for more than a few minutes. A wild back-of-the-envelope calculation says that, unless there's already a ready magma chamber just below the surface, such a hole isn't anywhere near feasible with our current technology. And if we drill into such an existing magma chamber, we're just doing what Ma Nature would have probably done in a few weeks.

Journey to the Center of the Earth!

[TaoPhoenix]

Jules Verne Likes This.

Re:Journey to the Center of the Earth!

[Tigger's Pet]

Yeah! "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is so much more catchy as a title. I bet old JV wouldn't have even found a publisher if he'd used "Mantle" in the book name instead.

Re:Journey to the Center of the Earth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok.

Re:Journey to the Center of the Earth!

[VennData]

Drill, Baby, Drill. Got a gotta nice ring to it.

Re:Journey to the Center of the Earth!

[syousef]

Jules Verne Likes This.

I didn't know he had a Facebook account.

Isn't the mud volcano enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

RUN!

Smells fishy...

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAG but with a large enough hole I believe it might make for a small island. Making small islands where you want seems like something any Military would be interested in. Then again, global warming isn't on their side...

Re:Smells fishy...

[Hazel Bergeron]

Standard freedom-loving procedure is to liberate an existing island for US military use, giving gratis one-way travel to the natives.

Re:Smells fishy...

[g0bshiTe]

Yes because occupying existing property is faster than waiting a few thousand years for an island to form.

A link is worth a thousand words

[DigitalSorceress]

Before they proceed, they need to go watch THIS

/nuff said

I predict...

[Stenchwarrior]

...they'll find a bunch of lonley socks. I mean, those fuckers have to end up somewhere.

Re:I predict...

[H0p313ss]

And ballpoint pens. (However I have already determined that pens gravitate here, the top of Grouse Mountain.

Re:I predict...

[ebh]

1. Drill hole through Earth's crust.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:I predict...

[neonfrog]

You're looking in the wrong direction. Everyone knows they end up in the hozone layer.

Re:I predict...

[daeley]

Scientists found that individual socks disappear in your clothes dryer and (through some still undetermined warping mechanism) transform into wire hangers in your closet.

Boon, or boom?

[russotto]

I can see two ways this could go. One, plentiful geothermal power wherever you can dig a big enough hole.

Two, artificial volcanos.

Either one is pretty cool.

Re:Boon, or boom?

[guspasho]

Three: Earthquakes. I'd think. It's already a problem with tapping into the crust for geothermal power.

Re:Boon, or boom?

[mayberry42]

I can see two ways this could go. One, plentiful geothermal power wherever you can dig a big enough hole.

Two, artificial volcanos.

Either one is pretty cool.

Yes...until environmentalists protest on grounds that they will cause further man-made induced global warming.

Re:Boon, or boom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three - growing artificial islands from spilled magma

Inferno

[The Grim Reefer2]

I saw how this turned out in a Dr. Who episode. Murderous mutated humans, parallel universes with the British military in Nazi-esque uniforms. Finishing up with the destruction of the planet. It's not good.

Re:Inferno

[Dunbal]

parallel universes with the British military in Nazi-esque uniforms

Not all that different than our universe, then. The only thing missing really is the uniform. The police state mechanism is already in place.

Re:Inferno

[snspdaarf]

Yeah, but if you took the eye patch off the Brigadier and put it on Liz Shaw, I could learn to live with it.

Project Mohole

[kldavis4]

I was wondering where Kim Stanley Robinson got the idea for moholes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mohole

Is there a duck named Gertrude involved?

[Anonymous Coward]

Inquiring minds want to know.

Nuclear waste disposal

[gr8_phk]

Can we inject all the spent nuclear fuel into the mantle and let it sink to the center? That's what's probably down there anyway...

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[KarrdeSW]

You want to put spent nuclear fuel rods into a burning hot ocean of magma in a spot where enormous upward pressure is being exerted? Realistically, a hole in the earth's crust that reaches the mantle already has a name. It's called a volcano. You wouldn't try to shit in an overflowing toilet, would you?

Though you may have something if you meant that we somehow insert spent fuel into a Subduction Zone, where a portion of the crust is sinking into the mantle anyway.

Personally, I'm all for storing the old fuel until technology becomes sufficiently advanced to use it again, there is still a ton of energy present in it. I'd say the best way to be safe from the stuff it is to bleed it dry.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Dunbal]

The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.

Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.

I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[0100010001010011]

They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> You want to put spent nuclear fuel rods into a burning hot ocean of magma in a spot where enormous upward pressure is being exerted?

It's no problem; we'll let British Petroleum handle the whole operation.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Kokuyo]

LFTR reactors are good at getting rid of the stuff, too, I heard.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[peter303]

Transporting to disposal site could be dangerous. Say there is a 1:300 shipwreck possibility. Is that worth it?

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[ElectricTurtle]

Volcanoes are not primarily caused by local differences in surface strata composition. There is a reason why volcanoes occur along fault lines and especially subduction/divergence zones. Volcanoes are driven in their development and activity primarily by activity in the mantle itself, whether that is melting crust in suduction zones causing plumes of lighter materials or plumes cascading out of the core itself to form hotspots. This is stark contrast to your artificially simplistic description of an equalization of pressure. Volcanoes occur where pressure is not equal.

The crust itself is surprisingly resilient in places where there are no special pressures. The Kola borehole proved that. Over seven and a half miles down and there was no explosion of pressure. If seven and a half miles of rock can be removed to no ill effect, then substituting it with water should not be as big a problem as you think it is, difference in weight not withstanding.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[drinkypoo]

They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.

Are they actually illegal, or is that just the way a certain non-nuclear proliferation treaty has been interpreted to date in order to protect the high price of nuclear fuel?

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people have proposed doing something similar to that.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[scubamage]

However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft.

Giggity.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[crabboy.com]

You wouldn't try to shit in an overflowing toilet, would you?

Depends on how bad I had to go...

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, breeders have been found to not be a viable solution. While I am sure there are arguments for both sides this report seems to outline the reasons that such reactors are in decline.

http://www.fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/02/history_and_status_of_fas.html

The short version is that breeders are not competitive with their light water counterparts, are unreliable, less safe and have significant proliferation concerns that have still not been addressed. Most of the countries that have had breeders have either shut them down and/or declined to build any more.

"Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States have abandoned their breeder reactor development programs. Despite the arguments by France's nuclear conglomerate Areva, that fast-neutron reactors will ultimately fission all the plutonium building up in France's light-water reactor spent fuel, France's only operating fast-neutron reactor, Phenix, was disconnected from the grid in March 2009 and scheduled for permanent shutdown by the end of that year. The Superphenix, the world's first commercial-sized breeder reactor, was abandoned in 1998 and is being decommissioned. There is no follow-on breeder reactor planned in France for at least a decade."

  As far as I can tell breeders are not illegal in the US, the technology has just been abandoned. The last breeder was shut down in 1994 under the Clinton Administration. Illegal is a bit strong, but I guess it's just semantics. If you can't get funding, approval and licensing you can't build so while it's not exactly illegal, you can't build one if you wanted to.

hmm, talk about irony - captcha - obstruct

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[ColdWetDog]

They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.

Like that stops anybody. We just need to set up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Breeder Reactors and we've got it made.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

They're called breeder reactors and already exist. They just happen to be illegal in the united states.

Good God. I would tell you to go read a book about it but I doubt that would happen. Would it kill you to at least Google?

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[demonbug]

The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.

Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.

I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.

First, to keep magma out of the drill pipe you would just need to keep pressure on your drilling fluid. We already do this; it would just require a higher pressure system than what is needed for, say, oil drilling. Of course, this could be a problem if your drilling fluid is flash-boiling as it encounters the magma, as it would be very difficult to control that much pressure and could lead to a blow out. However, unlike with oil, you could fairly easily stop any leaking lava by circulating cold water, or worst case, it freezes when it reaches sea water and plugs up your hole that way. You might build a small sea mound, but that's probably about the extent of the danger.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[knight24k]

They are not illegal as far as I can tell from Googling around. The breeder program has just been abandoned and defunded, which has pretty much the same effect. I doubt the non-proliferation treaty has anything to do with it, but they do happen to have a pretty serious proliferation problem among other things. The sodium that is normally used for a coolant is highly volatile and routinely causes fires from what I have read. So, while I always thought they were a good idea it appears that the technology is still unsafe, not very reliable and light water is still the best solution. Hopefully someday someone will be able to fix the issues with breeders and we'll be able to use all that spent fuel we've been accumulating.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[firewrought]

Are [breeder reactors] actually illegal, or is that just the way a certain non-nuclear proliferation treaty has been interpreted to date in order to protect the high price of nuclear fuel?

Executive order. Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing, presumably to encourage other nations to follow suit and reduce proliferation risk. He's always been criticized for that move but who knows... maybe it spared New York or London or Moscow from being hit with a dirty bomb.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[danhaas]

It is possible to use mud as a drilling fluid; it has a higher density and builds a higher pressure down the hole. That is how oil wells are drilled.
Another possible strategy is to pump the drilling fluid with a very high pressure directly on the well head. This will lead to higher pressures downward as well. Naturally, it would be necessary to contain that high pressure on the surface, which may be far too dangerous to be feasible.

Lava is quite dense, so it would lose a lot of pressure as it climbed up the hole, so maybe it wouldnt come up that fast. Human drilled holes are also narrow enough that heat transfer is an issue, so lava would solidify along the walls.

In oil wells, what really messes up is when you hit a pocket of gas trapped down there. But that gas is located with the oil and there shouldnt be any gas in the mantle, so a lava blow out should be easier to contain.

I guess the real challenge will be how to drill a hole with a temperature so high. A high flow of drilling fluid will be necessary to cool the drill, and maybe a water jet cutter would be better suited. Also, the mantle temperature is higher than mentioned in the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_jet_cutter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(geology)#Temperature

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[gr8_phk]

>> You want to put spent nuclear fuel rods into a burning hot ocean of magma in a spot where enormous upward pressure is being exerted?

It's no problem; we'll let British Petroleum handle the whole operation.

I think you just made his point...

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[dmgxmichael]

Where do you think geothermal energy is coming from? Much of it is radioactive isotope decay. The earth is basically a giant fission reactor, just as the sun (and all stars) is a ginormous fusion reactor.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[somepunk]

Yes, but Reagan rescinded that order. There was a rather nice breeder reactor that ran until Clinton defunded it, the Integral Fast Reactor.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[PwnzerDragoon]

*whoosh*

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Shotgun]

Magma is liquid rock. Right?

Try this experiment. Take a can of paint and leave the lid off until it skins over.
Now, drill a hole in the skin.
Does the liquid paint underneath come spewing out of the hole you just drilled, or does it just sort of sit there?

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[rrohbeck]

Mmm, radioactive volcanoes!

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[wagnerrp]

Radioactive decay and fission are not the same thing.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure they would use dense drilling mud not water or air. They try to keep the pressure caused by weight of mud equal to the pressure at the bottom of the hole.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[_0xd0ad]

Yes they are. Fission is usually used to describe when it's accelerated by bombarding it with the decay products of other fissioning nuclei, but it's nothing different happening really. Get enough fissile material in one lump and it'll go critical - its own radioactive decay will cause a chain reaction.

Radioactive decay is to fission as rusting is to iron being oxidized. They're exactly the same thing. It's just that the type of fission you're thinking of is like lighting a lump of steel wool... it's a self-sustaining reaction and it's much faster and hotter. But it's still the same thing.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[dmgxmichael]

Beat me to the punch.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[wagnerrp]

No. Spontaneous fission is a type of radioactive decay, but it is just that, spontaneous. By definition, it is an event completely independent of its environment. There is no bombardment needed to trigger it. All radioactive decay is just a series of independent events. Contrast this with a fission reactor where neutron bombardment triggers subsequent fission events, releasing more neutrons. This is a chain reaction and not spontaneous decay.

So yes, radioactive decay and a fission reactor are not the same thing. That said, there have been cases where a sufficient mass of fissionable material was collected in once place, and a natural reactor was started up.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[_0xd0ad]

Spontaneous fission is a type of radioactive decay

You didn't say "spontaneous fission" before.

radioactive decay and a fission reactor are not the same thing

Nor did you say "a fission reactor".

You said fission.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[zmooc]

Inserting spent fuel into a subduction zone would be just about the worst idea ever. Didn't you spot the volcano on the image on the wikipedia-page you link to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction#Volcanic_activity

Apart from that I'd say just like it's rather immoral to leave our kids with heaps of radioactive crap (because we fail to reuse it for political reasons), it'd be just as immoral to make vast amounts of valuable materials inaccessible forever.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[wagnerrp]

dmgxmichael said "giant fission reactor". Specifically, that much of the heat was from radioactive decay, and that the Earth was a giant fission reactor. Were the Earth a giant reactor, the heat from radioactive decay would be largely insignificant compared to that from induced fission.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[lennier]

The sodium that is normally used for a coolant is highly volatile and routinely causes fires from what I have read.

Yes, you wouldn't want to try to emergency cool a liquid sodium based reactor by, eg, pouring seawater on it from a fire hose. I'm not sure exactly what the emergency cooling options would be. Dump lead shot on it maybe? Just abandon the place and run?

Of course it's laughable that any reactor could ever get into such a state that it even required emergency cooling, because nothing ever goes wrong at nuclear plants or their offsite power grid, and never will for the forseeable future. So we're all good and breeders are the way of the future!

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[lennier]

We just need to set up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Breeder Reactors

... buy them all from a drive-thru window and use them before we get home!

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[_0xd0ad]

Were the Earth a giant reactor, the heat from radioactive decay would be largely insignificant compared to that from induced fission.

Induced fission is radioactive decay, just like burning steel wool is oxidizing. You're arguing over a pointless distinction that amounts to what caused the radioactive decay, which really doesn't matter. "The earth is basically a giant fission reactor" is a perfectly valid statement.

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

c'mon, we learned from the deepwater horizon that we absolutely have the expertise necessary to safely do something like this!

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[definate]

Sure. Rephrase it whatever way you want, the result is the same, isn't it? You essentially didn't provide any different information, you just chose to restate it in a manner which made it nefarious. I choose to take a different way of rephrasing it.

"Is that just the way a certain non-nuclear proliferation treaty has been interpreted to keep fucking hippies appeased?"

Those fucking hippies and their influence, always controlling the nuclear policy.

See, we can both do this, fun isn't it?

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[_0xd0ad]

I think the point of a liquid sodium reactor is that you wouldn't need to cool it very much, because the pressure would be so low that there would be essentially no risk of it breaching containment - just let it melt down and clean up afterward.

Vapor pressure of water at 650K (375 deg C) is about 22,000 kPa (217 atmospheres). As Google indicates that 33 feet of seawater equals 1 atmosphere, that pressure is equivalent to the pressure found at a depth of about 1.36 miles (2.18 kilometers).

In comparison, the vapor pressure of sodium at 650K is (extrapolating) maybe around 35 Pa (0.0003454 atmospheres)... and all the way up at 1150K (880 deg C) it's still only 100 kPa (0.9869 atmospheres).

Re:Nuclear waste disposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a nice article about using spent fuel in a system that designed to use spent fuel.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/the-irradiated-elephant-i_b_837412.html

Obviously, I'm stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

-but isn't this going to create a volcano?

Re:Obviously, I'm stupid

[osu-neko]

Not unless you drill down directly over a mantle plume. That's not something you're likely to do accidentally, given that mantle plumes are fairly easy to identify due to the proliferation of naturally occurring volcanoes above them.

Clever ploy

[degeneratemonkey]

This is really just a clever ploy to drill for oil, thinly veiled as science! Halliburton should take a page from this playbook.

"Extreme Heat"?

[jpapon]

In addition, new tools must be developed to withstand extreme pressure and heat – which can reach upwards of 300 degrees Celsius.

Oh no, THREE HUNDRED degrees celsius!!! Whatever will they do?

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[Yamata no Orochi]

Oh no, THREE HUNDRED degrees celsius!!! Whatever will they do?

Perhaps they shall bake a cake.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[blueg3]

300 Celsius? That's almost as hot as a pizza oven. I can't imagine how they're going to find tools that can function at that temperature.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I realise both you and OP are being sarcastic, however the biggest problem isn't finding tools to function at that temperature. The biggest problem is finding drilling equipment that can dissipate heat at that temperature while generating additional heat through friction. Try using a normal steel drill-bit in concrete for more than 15 minutes continuous in standard air temperature (lets say 21C) will render the drill bit useless just from friction generated heat (anecdotal, certainly - you are welcome to find your own sources or try the experiment yourself).

Now, the Russians probably used tungsten-carbide drill bits (which have about 2x the shear, 2x the melting point of 440 stainless steel and are significantly harder on the Mohr scale than steel - again, I couldn't find a source on the drill bits, I'm just guessing) and had enough heat dissipation issues when the ambient temperature reached 300 C + heat generated from friction drilling.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[groslyunderpaid]

If you have your pizza oven at 300c you must like a burnt ass pizza. Thats over 570F, most pizzas are cooked between 350F and 450F.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[_0xd0ad]

The Italians apparently don't agree with you...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza#Pizza_types

According to the rules proposed by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana, the genuine Neapolitan pizza [...] must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 C (905 F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire. When cooked, it should be crispy, tender and fragrant.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[charlesj68]

most pizzas are cooked between 350F and 450F.

You and your wimpy residential ovens! A good brick pizza oven will be going well *past* 450F. More like heat to 800, then cool to 750, then cook the pizza in a minute and a half.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[scubamage]

300 Celsius? That's almost as hot as a pizza oven. I can't imagine how they're going to find tools that can function at that temperature.

Obviously, you make them out of pizza. Problem solved!

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[LunaticTippy]

Drills use a fluid injected through the bit to cool and lubricate. The ambient temperature could be compensated for by chilling the drilling mud, using a higher volume, etc.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[blueg3]

That is a pansy-ass cooking temperature. At home, any thinner-crust pizza should be cooked in an oven of at least 500 F; more if you can manage it. A real brick pizza oven is substantially hotter, and commercial pizzerias regularly use them.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[groslyunderpaid]

Nice. Pizza shop I used to work at used conveyor belt ovens at 450 I believe, but longer than 90 seconds. Stone ovens are apparantly different. I recant.

Re:"Extreme Heat"?

[_0xd0ad]

Convection ovens can operate at lower temperatures because the airflow causes the food to heat and brown more evenly and quickly. Basically, you want to get it as hot as possible as quickly as possible. If it burns, it's only because you cooked it too long. (At least, with traditional thin-crust pizza. Deep-dish pizza wouldn't cook evenly, I imagine. You'd need slower heating to ensure that the temperature is even throughout.)

Heat issues

[Scootin159]

The soviets have already tried this, but ran into issues with the deep-crust temperatures (570*F when they stopped, but it was still climbing) melting their drill bits. How is this project intending to resolve this issue?

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

obv.
Frikkin lazers.

Re:Heat issues

[Tom Womack]

There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.

The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is hard (NASA have done some work in silicon-carbide-substrate semiconductors, since it would be fantastic to be able to run a robot on the surface of Venus, but I don't think they've met with much success).

Re:Heat issues

[MooseTick]

Drill bits made from lava?

Re:Heat issues

[sootman]

They'll go at night! Wait, sorry, wrong joke.

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

As blueg3 said just above, they'll most likely use pizza ovens as drill bits.
Sounds like it could work, right?
Once you start eating pizza, you just can't stop. So i assume that using a pizza OVEN would be like 100 pizzas.

As you can tell, i'm a major researcher in food science.

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Drill bits made from Java?

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they stopped drilling because they found this!

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: "In addition, new tools must be developed to withstand extreme pressure and heat – which can reach upwards of 300 degrees Celsius."

So now the real question is.. How did they come up with the 2020 estimate if they haven't solved this one issue?

Re:Heat issues

[DerekLyons]

Yeah, the project leaders are obviously unaware of work done forty years ago - and technology has stood still since then.

Re:Heat issues

[Rudisaurus]

I really, truly doubt that the Soviet drill bits were melting at 570*F or anything nearly so low. The melting point of carbon steel (a.k.a. mild steel -- NOT what they would use for a deep-earth drill bit) is 1425 - 1540*C or 2600 - 2800*F -- temperatures much higher than your 570*F.

The Wikipedia article you've cited only says that the drill bit "would no longer work" at such temperatures, not that it actually melted. Do you have some other authoritative source for your statement?

Sincerely, R. Stocker, Ph.D., P.Eng.

Re:Heat issues

[wagnerrp]

My experience is with machining, but the concepts are going to be largely the same. When machining, you want as hard a bit as possible. The harder the bit, the slower it will dull against your material. A given bit working on a given material will be limited to a feed rate, above which you will start tearing through your bit. As you machine faster, the bit will heat up and soften, and as explained, the softer the bit, the faster it will dull.

Cheap bits use mild steel. More expensive bits will use ceramic carbide tips, allowing faster feed rates on harder material. More expensive still will be diamond tipped. You will never machine fast enough to melt any of these materials, but it is certainly easy to get them up above their usable working temperatures. With higher ambient temperatures, it just means you have to machine that much slower to keep bit temperatures within that functional range.

Re:Heat issues

[mayberry42]

underwater?

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the water jets used to make the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Re:Heat issues

[Anonymous Coward]

In Democratic America drill bit melts you!

Sure!

[jenningsthecat]

Go poking holes in it and making volcanoes all over the place! See if WE care!

Sounds like a stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

They can just drill 500 meters into a volcano. Much easier.

Re:Sounds like a stupid idea

[osu-neko]

They can just drill 500 meters into a volcano. Much easier.

Or they can get in their kids sandbox. Even easier still. However, neither of these things will tell them anything about the Earth's mantle.

These 2 groups need to talk

[Andy_w715]

Researchers in the OP article need to get together with these guys http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1086/deep-ocean-chasm-baffles-researchers

Re:These 2 groups need to talk

[guspasho]

Whatever happened to those guys? What were the results of their research?

Old News

[bedouin]

Shredder and Krang already did this in like 1989.

Re:Old News

[f8l_0e]

It never fails. My mod points run out and the very next day, somebody writes something funny. Can somebody spare a mod point for a brother?

Crysta

[0olong]

Finally I can look forward to returning to my hometown...

Comparison with contemporary oil and gas drilling

[Tom Womack]

6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.

(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be drilled mostly horizontally. Some articles also measure depths of oil deposits from the top rather than the bottom of the water)

However, 4km of water is rather deeper than it seems anyone's done oil-drilling to date; there are wells in 2800m water in the Gulf of Mexico (the one that exploded last year was in 1500m) but there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper.

WoT

[little1973]

At last, the Great Lord shall be free...

Re:WoT

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't reveal the plan yet, lest the Kinslayer interfere.

Re:WoT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Thanks for spoiler, Brandon!

Re:WoT

[demonbug]

At last, the Great Lord shall be free...

Don't be silly, I'm sure Mierin has a foolproof plan for dealing with any unexpected consequences.

On a similar note, I heard Lloyd's is looking into offering a new Balrog insurance product.

Re:WoT

[Anonymous Coward]

And it shall come to pass that what men made shall be shattered,
and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of the Age,
and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man.
Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth.
Neither shall anything stand or abide...

Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow,
born once more as he was born before,
and shall be born again, time without end.
The Dragon shall be Reborn,
and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth.
In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people,
and he shall break the world again by his coming,
tearing apart all ties that bind.
Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burn us,
yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last Battle,
and his blood shall give us the Light.
Let tears flow, O ye people of the world.
Weep for your salvation. [1]

earth's mantle journeying to visit us, next weak?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's nonsense. as for 'living like kings', it looks like that's fantasy/fiction as well. the fear/media/hate/money/fear fueled corepirate nazi murder/mayhem, chemical alteration schemes, fake weather, weapons peddlers, black-ops minions, stand-up comedy diversions etc... looks real. chosen? chariots? gassing babys & mommys? honestly?

Article

[Anonymous Coward]

SYDNEY: A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth’s mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say.

By extracting samples of the mantle, which is nearly 3,000 km thick and contains roughly 68% of the planet’s mass, researchers hope to unearth valuable information about its composition that could yield clues about the evolution of the planet. It could also contribute to our understanding of how the ocean crust is formed, the nature of the crust-mantle boundary and the limits of microbial life under the Earth’s surface.

“If successful this would be the first in situ sampling of the largest part of our planet,” said Damon Teagle, a geochemistry professor at the University of Southampton in England and co-author of the report in Nature.

Ocean floor is optimal

In the past, researchers have been able to study fragments of the mantle thrust to the Earth’s surface by tectonic mountain building, sea-floor spreading, or encased in lava spewed from volcanic eruptions. As a result certain features of the mantle’s dense, rocky composition are already known.

According to the report, however, the processes that force these fragments upward to the surface chemically alter their composition and displace key trace elements that might be useful in reconstructing the Earth’s evolution.

To fill in the gaps, researchers must extract samples of the mantle below the oceanic crust. The ocean floor is optimal for drilling because its crust is a mere six km thick compared to continental crust, which can range from 30 to 60 km in thickness.

The Japanese factor

Teagle, who will lead a run-up expedition this spring to bore further into the oceanic crust than ever before, said the forward push to get this project rolling is coming largely from Japanese funding agencies and the availability of a massive Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel called Chikyu.

The ship has ‘riser drilling’ equipment necessary for the eventual exploration of the mantle. There is an outer pipe around the drill string through which rock cuttings can be transported back to the ship. This allows for better well control and stability, and will help prevent rock cuttings from blocking the drill bit, said Teagle.

But many challenges still exist. “We will need to drill a 6.5 km hole intothe ocean floor in roughly 4,000 m of water [and] a ship that can be dynamically positioned to stay precisely above a drill hole for many months at a time,” said Teagle. In addition, new tools must be developed to withstand extreme pressure and heat – which can reach upwards of 300 degrees Celsius.

But worth the cost?

Neville Exon, a marine geophysicist at the Australian National University, said the project would be a massive technological undertaking that could carry a price tag upwards of a billion dollars.

Still, he said the prospect of reaching the mantle was an exciting one. “This was the original reason ocean drilling began,” he said.

“This could give us a tremendous insight into how the Earth works because the circulation of the mantle is what drives plate tectonics.”

A fifty-year effort still ongoing

The first attempt to drill the Earth’s mantle was in 1961 with the U.S.-led Project Mohole – an ambitious ocean-drilling endeavour that collapsed in 1966 when costs began spiralling out of control.

Nevertheless, this project – which coincided with the growing scientific acceptance of plate tectonics – proved the viability of ocean basement drilling and spawned an array of international drilling efforts over the following decades and into the present-day.

Over the next three years, geophysical surveys will be conducted at three Pacific Ocean locations to determine the best site to begin exploratory drilling.

shadow and flame

[fdicostanzo]

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum shadow and flame.

— Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

Now You've Gone And Done It

[smitty777]

It will probably deflate the earth like a giant beach ball

Re:Now You've Gone And Done It

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the vision of the earth flying around the solar system like a full balloon released with the neck open.

Re:Now You've Gone And Done It

[smitty777]

Ha ha...I can't stop thinking about the sound effect that mental image produces

Dr. Evil

[domatic]

"Soon we'll be able to hold the world hostage with sprays of hot liquid mag-ma!" (holds pinky to mouth>)

Great

[vgbndkng]

Here come the Hadals.

I want one

[Locke2005]

This hole would make an excellent geothermal energy source. (By the way, why doesn't somebody start using abandoned oil wells for geothermal?)

Re:I want one

[wagnerrp]

This hole would make a terrible geothermal energy source. Sure, there's a several hundred degree temperature difference, but that temperature difference is several kilometers apart. Bringing that differential together would likely cost more energy than you might be able to recover.

Re:I want one

[Locke2005]

You need a heat pipe. Since the heat is moving straight up, convection alone should do it -- no energy input should be required. Granted, a 5K long heat pipe is a major expense. Ideally, the top end should be under water, to use water as a heat sink. You would have losses in the pipe, but should still have plenty of temperature differential to run a Sterling Cycle engine.

Isn't it obvious?

[hellfire]

They found some Unobtainium!

Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

... as weapons of mass destruction? Why invade Iraq if you can just make a few volcanoes pop up where ya needs 'em?

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[osu-neko]

... as weapons of mass destruction? Why invade Iraq if you can just make a few volcanoes pop up where ya needs 'em?

So... you think it might be too difficult to invade, but you think you can manage to send a bunch of engineers with heavy machinery in to the foreign country and have them drill a few hole, and no one will notice or stop them during the months or years it takes them? xD

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they would ruin the critical infrastructure we need to pump out all that .... erm, I mean to support the civilian population.

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

I was assuming a bit more refinement of the technique, ya know, let ya trigger it from afar. Maybe drill at a slant or something? Although putting Halliburton people on the front lines for once might be a good thing for everybody (else)....

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[c6gunner]

... as weapons of mass destruction? Why invade Iraq if you can just make a few volcanoes pop up where ya needs 'em?

Why screw with volcanoes when you can drop a couple nukes where ya needs 'em?

You don't invade to distroy - you invade to control. Clinton's Iraq war was the former - GW's Iraq war was the latter.

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

Ummm... "distroy"? Is that a Linux thing, like distro-y?

Clinton never got a war in Iraq! Iraq wars seem to be an exclusive Bush Family thing.
And is it any wonder considering they're thick-as-thieves pals with Saudi princes?

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[c6gunner]

Ummm... "distroy"? Is that a Linux thing, like distro-y?

Grow up.

Clinton never got a war in Iraq!

Right. I suppose he never bombed the shit out of Serbia, either.

And is it any wonder considering they're thick-as-thieves pals with Saudi princes?

Given the ignorance displayed in your previous two sentences, I probably shouldn't be surprised that you're unaware of the connection between all American presidents - democrat or republican - and Saudi Arabia. Still, it always throws me for a loop when I see someone suggesting that there's some kind of split between the parties when it comes to the Saudis. How can you be that ignorant of the politics of your own nation?

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

You don't get a legitimate right to take this holier-than-thou attitude when you provide no more proof of your counterclaims than I did my own. Unless you can irrefutably disprove my statements, calling me ignorant is just so much testosterone-fueled hot air. I am aware of the cozy decades-long relationship between U.S. administrations and Saudi Arabia, but the Bush family has had a profoundly deeper one than most. That isn't merely my contention. And there was not a genuine invasion of Iraq during the Clinton presidency; yes, there were air campaigns and strikes from afar, but no boots on the ground. That only happened during the two Bush presidencies. Not what I would call a "war".

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

And by the way, congratulations on perverting a HUMOR POST into a my-penis-is-bigger-than-yours contest.

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[c6gunner]

You don't get a legitimate right to take this holier-than-thou attitude when you provide no more proof of your counterclaims than I did my own

My apologies - I looked at your UID and assumed you knew how to use Google. I didn't realize you were still stuck with Ask Jeeves.

Unless you can irrefutably disprove my statements, calling me ignorant is just so much testosterone-fueled hot air

Well, I can, so I guess your statement doesn't apply?

I am aware of the cozy decades-long relationship between U.S. administrations and Saudi Arabia

*golf clap*

but the Bush family has had a profoundly deeper one than most.

You don't get a legitimate right to take this holier-than-thou attitude when you provide no more proof of your counterclaims than I did my own.

That isn't merely my contention.

Yeah, other ideologues say it, too. It must be true!

And there was not a genuine invasion of Iraq during the Clinton presidency;

Never said there was. Nice straw-man!

yes, there were air campaigns and strikes from afar, but no boots on the ground. That only happened during the two Bush presidencies. Not what I would call a "war".

Miriam Webster is your friend
war
noun, often attributive \wor\
Definition of WAR
1
a (1) : a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations (2) : a period of such armed conflict (3) : state of war
b : the art or science of warfare
c (1) obsolete : weapons and equipment for war (2) archaic : soldiers armed and equipped for war
2
a : a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism
b : a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end
c : variance, odds 3

I guess you'd like that changed? What shall the new definition be? How about:

war
noun, often attributive \wor\
Definition of WAR
1
a : armed conflict between states, except when it's a democrat president killing brown people from the air.
b: anything a republican does, including playing with puppies.

How does that sound?

Actually, if we're to be completely honest, I'd agree that we need to differentiate between different types of conflicts. However, if we're going to start redefining words, then Iraq and Afghanistan both stopped being wars around week 3 after the invasion and turned into police-actions / nation-building missions. As long as we continue calling them wars, you don't get to put a different label on what Clinton did.

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[macraig]

Miriam Webster is not your friend, nor is Google nor Wikipedia. It's ignorant dogmatic people who so quickly resort to such a tactic. You wasted no time at all. I will not indulge your bar-fight mentality any further. Take it outside. I won't be joining you.

Re:Artificial volcanoes....

[c6gunner]

See, if you're going to link to definitions of "ad-hominem", you should at least peruse the articles first, in order to make sure they support the point you're trying to make. For instance, from Wikipedia:

Common misconceptions
Gratuitous verbal abuse or "name-calling" itself is not an ad hominem or a logical fallacy.[7][8][9][10][11]
This is not to be confused with a true fallacy, which would be "X is idiotically ignorant [of politics], so why should we listen to him now?"

Also, I'm very hurt that you don't want to be my friend any more. If I promise not to make you feel dumb any more, will you take me off your enemies list? Please? Pretty, pretty please?

I've played enough Minecraft...

[ElementOfDestruction]

I've played enough minecraft to know, that if you start digging down into the bedrock, you have to have some rock handy to plug a hole that you make otherwise your dungeon will fill with lava. Just my $0.02

geologists have found mantle rocks on land

[peter303]

Sometimes the tectonic plates buckle and carry upper mantle rocks up a dozen miles onto land. This is call obduction.
In other places high pressure gasses from the upper mantle shoot rocks to the surfaces. These areas are called kimberlites and are sources of diamonds.

Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.

Re:geologists have found mantle rocks on land

[MagikSlinger]

Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.

There is still interest in direct sampling because a) those rocks you mentioned are ancient and may not reflect current conditions in the mantle, and b) there are still debates on just how plastic mantle material is which affects all sorts of modelling.

Waste of Time & Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a crap? The Japanese should pull all the funding and reallocate it to the sunami cleanup effort.

What if we wake the Silurians?

[netrangerrr]

You know, something like this happened in the Welsh village of Cwmtaff once. Wink, wink - anyone get the reference?

Re:What if we wake the Silurians?

[rossdee]

I think that would have been during the Pertwee era or maybe Tom Baker. (Both of whom made better Drs than the current one.)

Re:What if we wake the Silurians?

[eriqk]

It will give a whole new meaning to the word "bluegrass".

Re:What if we wake the Silurians?

[osu-neko]

I think that would have been during the Pertwee era or maybe Tom Baker. (Both of whom made better Drs than the current one.)

Have you watched them recently? I have fond childhood memories of Tom Baker, but I rewatched some recently and... um... let's just say my judgment has become more discerning in recent years. Matt Smith is no David Tennant, but he's actually quite a bit better than Tom Baker.

Like poking a hole in a balloon?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has GOT to be a bad idea, right?

Best/Worst case scenario

[ProppaT]

Best case scenario: Hollow Earth theory is correct and we find Hitler riding dinosaurs in the middle of the earth.

Worst case scenario: Earth, quite literally, shoots its load and we're screwed.

CAUTION: Yellowstone caldera is HAUNTED

[Anonymous Coward]

Its haunted. Its HAUNTED. THAT is why we don't drill into it. Its build on an Indian Burial Ground, and it's haunted. We're not drilling their ever. There are ghosts underneath it that will escape, and it will be haunted.

Re:CAUTION: Yellowstone caldera is HAUNTED

[Illicon]

So... what are you saying?

And, in their greed for knowledge

[GodfatherofSoul]

They'll unleash a balrog that decimates civilization. No thanks, Mr. Smarty Pants scientists...

Re:And, in their greed for knowledge

[alta]

Funny timing, I've been playing lord of the rings online for the last hour (free to play if you like) and just finally discovered Durin's Bane... the Balrog.

It's dead on the side of the misty mountains. Not sure how it got there after Gandalf killed it, guess they just threw it out like trash.

Re:And, in their greed for knowledge

[Asmodae]

"Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside." - Gandalf

I think that's where Gandalf left it.

Silurians

[Psion]

But what about the risk of waking the sleeping race of prehistoric reptiles buried underground to hide from the impact of the moon? Surely it's too great to take!

B-Movie Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Brings back memories of wasting a Saturday afternoon watching "Crack in the World"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/

Hey, let's blow off the crust and make a second moon! Surely we'll all survive happily ever after in that scenario, right?

Perhaps the answer to nuclear waste?

[millertym]

Dump it into the mantle? Hmmm... got to be at least as safe as a Yucca Mountain type setup once you get it down there. Transporting it safely to the "Mantle dumping station" could be tricky.

Re:Perhaps the answer to nuclear waste?

[Anonymous Coward]

wait... let's drill it INSIDE Yucca Mountain

Same thing happened with Project Mohole

[Latent Heat]

The same thing happened with Project Mohole, the Journey Partway to the Center of the Earth Project funded by NSF in the '60's.

The Moho is short for Mohorovicic -- a Hrv (Croatian) scientist who discovered some seismic-wave boundary between crust and upper mantle. The Mohole was the effort do drill "partway to China" as it were, doing this in the ocean where the crust is to be thinner. You had to do seaborne drilling, which is hard, but you had to drill through less crust.

It seems that Texas drilling contractor Brown and Root blew through the budget and they never got there.

almost there

[demonbug]

A few more Moho Mines, a couple of fusion plants, and I'll be able to start work on my Krogoth...

Hell Sounds from Siberia dig, years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iPIXq_jGMQ

and iirc, Jacques Cousteau was said to have heard the same type of things while spelunking caves at the floor of the ocean (hearing the screaming voices of 1,000's of people as if they were being tortured in hell).

The Andromeda Strain

[SimplyGeek]

I can't believe no one mentioned The Andromeda Strain! It's one of my favorite books. It was about a pre-historic bacteria that was thrown up high into the Earth's orbit as life was just beginning to evolve. As such, no life on Earth had ever had contact with it and therefore there was no immunity. Then one day a space test brings a sample down to Earth and it instantly wipes out the whole town. Now imagine the same thing happening, but the bacteria comes not from the outer atmosphere, but from deep in our mantle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

the fires within

[thanasakis]

Short story by A.Clarke, highly recommended

football size diamonds

[k6mfw]

I read someplace diamonds formed deep below (high temperatures, high pressures) are the size of footballs. However, as they are pushed upwards through the crust over millions of years, they get broken up into much smaller pieces. And much smaller than footballs when it finally makes it to the near surface. (yes diamonds are hard but give tectonic movements enough time, anything will break).

But think of what it would be like getting the diamond the size of a football! And all the chicks you can pick up with it.

Re:football size diamonds

[Anonymous Coward]

Diamonds are hard but they are also quite brittle.

Re:football size diamonds

[PPH]

American football or international football (soccer ball)?

Project SOHO

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of an old "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" comic book story about project SOHO. Y'all are taking me back a few years.

Universal solvent?

[heidaro]

This just reminds me of this awesome Donald Duck comic by Don Rosa; The Black Solvent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universal_Solvent_(comics) Basically, we'll get lots of super dense diamonds and destroy the earth!

Starfish

[cellocgw]

By Peter Watts.

So you see, they *could* unleash a 100% killer bug (except for... well, I'm not giving away all the cool stuff in the next two volumes)

Rose-colored glasses

[KingAlanI]

I haven't watched much Dr. Who in particular, but I know what you mean - go back to a work a few years later, and you'll sometimes find that your rose-colored glasses are gone.

Re:Rose-colored glasses

[neminem]

Yeah. As someone who had never been properly introduced to the Doctor until the new series started, and who since went back and found a large quantity of the old stuff... the new stuff is much better, in general. (Other than season 5. No offense to Matt Smith, who I like fine; just whatever braindead monkeys are writing his scripts.)

Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a third. It boils off all of our oceans causing Mars to look like a relaxing vacation spot.

Mohole Again

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time only got around 8 Km deep. That was in New Mexico. they needed to go over 15 Km to really get to the mantle. the heat damaged the drill bits.

This time they think they need to get equipment rated for over 300 C. I think lava is hotter than that. the mantle heats the lava. 3,000 C might be more like it. Pressure will be pretty high too. Just think, a man made volcano. How cool is that?

Mandatory

[Lunzo]

Drill Baby Drill!

Energy crysis solved

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too bad that the Mantle of the Earth isn't jam-packed with the geothermal powerhouse we call partially molten rock.

Oh wait...

Pellucidar?

[Anonymous Coward]

David Innes and Abner Perry achieved this feat about a hundred years ago.