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

[Snowgen]

That was the Weekly World News , not the National Enquirer. They have completely different styles.

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:The National Enquirer

[amiga3D]

Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet. He has been cast out of heaven but will not be imprisoned in hell until after the Second Coming of Christ. I know in popular culture they like to speak of him ruling in Hell and tormenting the lost souls but that doesn't follow the scripture.

Re:The National Enquirer

[AthanasiusKircher]

Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet. He has been cast out of heaven but will not be imprisoned in hell until after the Second Coming of Christ. I know in popular culture they like to speak of him ruling in Hell and tormenting the lost souls but that doesn't follow the scripture.

Meh. It depends on what you mean by Hell. Do you mean Hades or Gehenna or Sheol or the Lake of Fire, or something else?

See, the problem with your assertion is that it depends on centuries of theologians who conflated a bunch of these things (which are all distinct concepts, often from different traditions with different attributes), made assumptions about how they relate to each other, and tried to figure out consistency in a bunch of inconsistent passages.

What you're really referring to is the passage in Revelation 20:10, which implies that the devil ("diabolos") won't be imprisoned in the "lake of fire" until after the coming of Christ. But what is your basis for declaring the "lake of fire" to be synonymous with the English word "Hell," instead of assuming that Hell could be equated with one of the other concepts already mentioned? And how do you know the "devil" isn't in any of the others? The Book of Job notes that Satan wanders about to all sorts of places and is even brought to talk to God. How do you know Satan doesn't wander into any of these other haunts?

Some people also note that the greatest feature of Hell is "eternal torment," and the Bible identifies the most significant feature of eternal torment to be separation from God. Since most Christians agree that the "devil" (whatever that is -- word problems there too... are we talking Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub etc.? -- these guys were all different) has already been cast out of Heaven, he has already been separated from God and is thus already suffering the primary torment of "Hell," whether or not he is physically located in the "Lake of Fire."

And how do we determine that the "diabolos" (devil) who is cast into the Lake of Fire (if that is indeed "Hell") is the same as Satan or the fallen angel or Lucifer or whoever?

Basically, rather than saying what you did:

Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet

You should say:

Biblically the Diabolos has not been cast into the Lake of Fire yet. But centuries of debates and random equivalencies created by Church dogma have led to a common interpretation that this "diabolos" is the same as what were likely understood in Biblical times to be distinct entities such as Satan and Lucifer, and the "Lake of Fire" is now equated with various conceptions of "Hell" which had different terms and would have been viewed as distinct in Biblical times. Thus, according to the Biblical text combined with a crapload of random church dogma, the traditional popular culture image "doesn't follow the scripture."

Egon, remember that time you tried to drill a hole

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Egon, remember that time you tried to drill a hole through your head?

Re:I remember

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 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.

Re:Blow up the world!

[Arashi256]

Dude, do you even physics?

Re:Does the mantle even exist?

[gtall]

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.

Re:I remember

[sunderland56]

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

Re:Blow up the world!

[Bengie]

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.

Re:Blow up the world!

[serviscope_minor]

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.