Scientists Begin Another Attempt To Drill Through the Earth's Crust

schwit1 writes: An expedition to the Indian Ocean is about to begin an effort to drill a core down through the Earth's crust and into its mantle. Geologists have been trying to drill through the contact between the crust and the mantle, called the Moho, since the 1960s, with no success. Either the projects have gone way over budget and been shut down, have failed due to engineering problems, or were stopped by the geology itself. This last issue is maybe the most interesting: "Expeditions have come close before. Between 2002 and 2011, four holes at a site in the eastern Pacific managed to reach fine-grained, brittle rock that geologists believe to be cooled magma sitting just above the Moho. But the drill could not punch through those tenacious layers. And in 2013, drillers at the nearby Hess Deep found themselves similarly limited by tough deep-crustal rocks." This new project hopes to learn from these past problems to obtain the first rock samples from below the Earth's crust. (Here's an eccentric introduction to the Hess Deep rift.)

Comments

The National Enquirer

[Deadstick]

...will probably be all over this one. Eons ago they published a cover story about a super-deep oil well that had drilled into Hell and let the Devil escape...there was a picture of billowing black smoke over an oil well fire that had been retouched to make a satanic face.

Re:The National Enquirer

[ShanghaiBill]

That story was published by the Weekly World News. Compared to the WWN, the National Enquirer is serious journalism.

Re:Egon, remember that time you tried to drill a h

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.

Re:Blow up the world!

[Arashi256]

Dude, do you even physics?

Re:I remember

[sunderland56]

I remember a different attempt. I believe they missed the left turn at Albuquerque.

Re:Blow up the world!

[AK Marc]

That you have no imagination doesn't make it impossible. What's the weight of the crust? I would guess the pressure is about 100,000 psi (average) on the mantle. So what happens when you have a 10 cm hole in a balloon pressurized to 100,000 psi? does it matter if the filling in the balloon is molten rock?

Note I'm not saying what I think will happen, or my opinion on the whole matter. I'm just stating you are an idiot because you can't think of a single catastrophic thing that could happen from this.