Slashdot Mirror
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.)
>> Doctor stopped it...went to an alternate dimension or something
Yep: 3rd Doctor in "Inferno" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - and just like Star Trek you knew it was an alternate dimension because character's facial hair was different.
That was the Weekly World News , not the National Enquirer. They have completely different styles.
Well, seismic waves travel differently between what we define to be the crust and the mantle. So yes, there is something else down there that is not crust, we call it the mantle. You might try wikipedia, this is the teens, honey.