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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.)
...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.
Egon, remember that time you tried to drill a hole through your head?
>> 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 would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.
The Lizard Men living inside the hollow Earth won't allow it. They've already positioned plates of ultra-dense titanium right where we'll drill so we can't punch through...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
turn the whole world into Oklahoma?
Dude, do you even physics?
Geology noob here, with a noob question. Has the mantle been definitively proven to exist? Browsing the summary, it looks to me like no one has ever seen or touched the earth's mantle, and that scientists are trying to drill through the crust and reach the mantle for the first time to do exactly that.
It would be interesting if they they drill through the earth's crust completely, and instead of the mantle they find something else. Maybe more crust? Or....
Do you even know what "interferometry" means?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I remember a different attempt. I believe they missed the left turn at Albuquerque.
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.
Learn to love Alaska
Volcanos do this all of the time. This reminds me of people saying particle accelerators could create dangerous backholes, when much much higher energy particles slam our atmosphere all of the time.
You're right, a hole that small won't make the world blow up unless you drill it through the exact center of the Large Hadron Collider
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That you have no imagination doesn't make it impossible.
No, but knowing physics allows you to make informed guesses about things. I can imagine all sorts of wildly impossible things, like the earth being hollow and inhabited by lizard men. Just because I can imagine it, doesn't make it possible.
So what happens when you have a 10 cm hole in a balloon pressurized to 100,000 psi?
The earth isn't a balloon. The pressure in a balloon is caused by the skin. In the earth it's caused by the weight of stuff above.
Imagine what happens---actually you do need a good imagination. The molten rock starts gushing up the hole at 100,000psi pressure (or whatever). As it goes higher and higher, the the weight of the molten rock starts increasing the pressure at the bottom, since the 100,000 psi has to support the weight of the column of molten rock, any excess pressure of course pushes more melt out of the hole. This will continue until the pressure reaches equilibrium. At that point, molten rock will stop gushing up the hole.
Things might get a bit worse if there's a local excess of pressure due to convection currents, for example, but what you'll have there is a volcano with a very, very small chimney, and a pressure excess which isn't enough to push through the crust anyway. As the rock cools, it will plug the hole.
I'm just stating you are an idiot because you can't think of a single catastrophic thing that could happen from this.
Physics works. Just because I can imagine crazy outcomes like the earth popping like a balloon, an invasion of the lizard men released from their eternal prison or an unstoppable column of fire reaching half way to the moon, doesn't mean those imaginings are actually worth considering.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Of course not. They were using KY. That means they're coming in the back door!
Anyhow, I sometimes wonder if scientists (of which I'm told I am one though I'd disagree) are hell bent on destroying life as we know it. Now, I have absolutely no idea what will happen if they manage to drill this hole. I admit this. However, do they? Let's just weaken the crust that keeps the warm gooey bits inside. Let's unleash an unholy gob of magma onto the crust 'cause we figure that pressing the unknown red button is a good idea. What can possibly go wrong?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."