Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth's Crust

AtariAmarok writes "A new article is up on LiveScience about a hole drilled into the Earth's crust to explore the layers of our planet's substrate. The hole gets closer to the mantle than any other efforts that have gone before. The hole might reach the "Moho" (division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle) within a few years." From the article: "The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness."

Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line...

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Good day, gentlemen...as you are no doubt aware, I have drilled a gigangtic hole straight through the Earth's crust. This hole will allow me to usher in a glorious new era of total world domination; for this reason, I have dubbed this latest caper "Operation Glory-Hole".

You see, gentleman, the bottom of this hole is only a scant 1000 feet away from the firey liquid mantle of the Earth itself...when I detonate a small nuclear device at the bottom of this hole, Operation Glory-Hole will create a gigantic super-volcano, radically altering the Earth's climate and laying waste to civilization...that is, unless you pay me...
ONE HUNDRED MILLION BILLION JILLION DOLLARS!!!

/dramaticmusic

Gentleman, you have my demands. Peace out.

Re:Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Evil is stealing my Moho baby!

Re:Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line...

[AtariAmarok (451306)]

"Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line"

Uhhh. Hi Dick. How ya doin'?'

Re:Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line...

[xs650 (741277)]

Were you addressing Bush or Cheney?

Re:Mr President, Dr. Evil is on the line...

[MutantHamster (816782)]

Sure, everyone's all excited about drilling a hole now, but as soon as they accidentally drill into the Earth's hollow interior [wikipedia.org] and drain the entire ocean, they'll be nothing but excuses.

Re:Would it work?

[osmic234 (807261)]

Unlikely. The Mohorovicic (Moho) discontinuity can be described in a few different ways - either where seismic veolocities have a marked discontinuity, or where a noticable chemical/mineralogical change occurs (can't remember what it is, I'm a geophysicist, not a geologist). What it's not is a boundary between a nice solid crust floating on top of "firey liquid mantle". In fact more accurate terms are lithosphere and asthenosphere, rather than crust and mantle, which basically differentiate between rigid, colder material, and warmer, more ductile rock. The top of the mantle is still solid, but becomes increasingly ductile with depth. Various minerals reach melting point as you go down towards the Core-Mantle Boundary, but basically I think you have to get to the outer core before it's all liquid (mostly iron). In terms of energies, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was about 55-60 megatonnes (depending on who you ask), in 1961 by the USSR. The energy released by the great 1960 Chilean earthquake (the largest recorded in the last 100 years) was equivalent approximately to a 2000 Mt bomb. So, setting off a nuke at the moho might temporarily create a small spherical cavity which would probably collapse in on itself, and maybe create some melt, but it's doubtful it would come gushing to the surface as a raging plume of "liquid hot magma". Besides, there have been plenty of underground nuclear tests, and none of those have resulted in a humungous volcano. As yet. The USGS site at http://www.usgs.gov/ [usgs.gov] is probably a good place to find out more.

The More Interesting Story

[Steven Edwards (677151)]

Is the link at the bottom which talks about the idea of using a nuke to drop a probe to the earths core.

Grrrreat. Let's poke a big hole in the planet.

[itomato (91092)]

There's no tampon made than could contain the leak that would create.

Bad Scientists! Bad!

Terraform: Construct Thermal Borehole

[Rob Simpson (533360)]

+6 minerals
+6 energy

WARNING: Significant negative ecological impact

China

[Rylz (868268)]

Pfft. I nearly made it from my sandbox to China with nothing but buckets back in my preschool days!

Screw black-holes and grey goo...

[Pinkoir (666130)]

...this Dr. Evil hole is the greatest threat that mad-science presents to us.

What happens if when they finally penetrate the crust the whole planet pops like a balloon?

LIKE A BALLOON!!

Think of all that crazy magma spewing out all over the place and our beloved globe zooming randomly all over the solar system before finally falling flacid and empty to the floor somewhere near Mars.

When will these insane "geologists" learn not to poke holes in our Mother Earth.

-Pinkoir

Drilling Technology Upgrades Needed

[geomon (78680)]

EOS [eos-magazine.com] covered this recent work just recently. The problem with offset drilling is that it does not provide the same informatio as a continuous core. These cores are obtained from 'windows' in previous flows and there is a problem with correlation between boreholes when horizons are not sampled widely. This complicates the historical interpreation and genesis of the oceanic crust.

The demand for advanced drilling technology is one problem with the current Moho sampling efforts. Exploration drilling of the kind used for oil production is not well suited for the work that the ODP [columbia.edu] is engaged in. Bit designs for the lithostatic loads that these dense rocks develop at depth require a different approach than those used to drill continental sediments buried at depth beneath the ocean.

Hole's Enemy

[Chubby_C (874060)]

Don't forget the hole's only natural enemy is the pile

Wal-Mart and IKEA

[failedlogic (627314)]

How long before Wal-Mart and/or IKEA uses drilling holes through the Earth to reduce supply-chain management costs. I envision, there could be a hole going from China to California and/or Seattle.

How much heat can those RFID tags resist anyways??!

Re:First they pearce the crust...

[djdavetrouble (442175)]

And then you come to the caramel lower mantle, then the delicious chocolate core.

Re:is it wise?

[stratjakt (596332)]

That's happening all the time on the sea floor, where the plates are slowly separating.

A bunch of lava will squish out, immediatly cool, and plug the hole, and they'll have to start all over again.

Kind of like Cool Hand Luke.

Re:is it wise?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is exactly what will happen. Just think of it like pricking a hole in a balloon, next thing you know we are 'ppttthhhhhhhhhh' on our way to Jupiter.

Re:is it wise?

[Planesdragon (210349)]

and opening a hole will relieve that pressure and cause a large amount of it to flow out?

Why, yes, that can happen. Mind you, "large" is only on the human scale, and this is hardly an unusual circumstance.

What is essetnially (but not actually) mantle-juice flows out onto the crust on a somewhat irregular basis. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's quite specatcular when molten rock et al flow out.

As for a "large ammount" -- us drilling into the mantle is like us sticking a very large straw into the ocean. Sure, the water down at the bottom is under pressure, and it will shoot up the straw if we let it. But the ocean certainly isn't going anywhere.

Re:is it wise? HAWAII!!

[Thunderstruck (210399)]

The same way we got the Dakotas. We walked up to the natives and said hey, lets have a treaty...

Re:is it wise?

[perspicaciously (828688)]

The pressure inside the balloon is much greater than the pressure outside the balloon

The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon. The reason balloons expand when you fill them with air is so that they equalize the pressures. Since the balloon is made of an elastic material without a rigid structure, maintaining equal pressures on either side of the membrane is the configuration that requires the least energy. As the balloon becomes really inflated, the latex can't stretch easily, and it does compress the air inside--but not much, just 5 or 6 mm of mercury.

when you prick it, the pressure equalizes, causing the balloon to pop

The "pop" isn't really related to the pressure equalizing. The latex is under high hoop and axial stress, and when it gets pricked, the hole that forms breaks lines of stress and the latex gets pulled away from the hole. This tears the latex, very rapidly--considerably faster than the speed of sound. The ends of the latex are under so much stress that they contract as fast as the tears occur, and create a small shockwave/sonic boom. When put scotch tape on the balloon where you prick it (before pricking it, of course), the strain around the hole isn't enough to start the tears, since that also requires tearing the scotch tape (or tearing away from it).

However, you're very right that we can't compare this to the earth, because the crust of the earth certainly isn't under high uniform elastic tension attempting to maintain internal and external pressures.

Re:Yay!

[DrLZRDMN (728996)]

shouldn't that be underlords?

Re:Help me out...

[Decaff (42676)]

But how smart is drilling into the core of the earth? Aren't they asking for one huge volcano?

No, as magma is coming up to the surface all the time all over the world in holes much, much larger than the borehole.

If someone who was hell bent on one HUGE suicide bomb, what is to stop a country from picking 4 or 5 places around the world, dig deep, and pack a nuke. Blow up the nuke, and the earth is rearranged.

Nothing much would happen. The energy already being released by normal volcanoes and earthquakes is far more than we could produce with nuclear weapons. For example, the Mount St. Helens volcano released energy in just one day (18 May 1980) equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT - about 20,000 Hiroshima bombs. That is a significant fraction of the entire world's current nuclear arsenal - from just one volcano! A few nukes exploded around the world is not going to do anything.

Re:Help me out...

[EtherAlchemist (789180)]

Aren't they asking for one huge volcano?

No. Well, maybe in the movies.

Think about it for a second. All over the world there a thousands of holes that already lead to the molten material, and yes- they are volcanoes.

BUT, how many of those are constantly spewing molten rock? Relatively few. And some of those are so consistent in their eruptions people live on them. Hawaii for one, Iceland another.

When a volcano like Tambora (largest recent) or even Fish Canyon or Yellowstone (28 million and 1.3 million YA, respectively) went off, the earth wasn't "rearranged." Sticking a nuke in a relatively tiny hole wouldn't even really have a major impact on the local area. It certainly wouldn't cause the kind of damage you're talking about. How many times have nukes been tested underground, or even above? The damage to the earth was minimal. It was all the things around the blast that suffered damage.

Worst case scenereo and the USA is relocated to the moon.

Unlikely, Fish Canyon only ejected about 5000 cubic kilometers and it was in the USA which is, obviously, still here.

Re:At what cost?

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Your tax dollars at work. How much money did this cost?

Here we go again.

In order to avoid these inevitable comments that appear in every thread with a scientific topic, I suggest that no international research project be allowed to proceed unless it has been cleared by a panel of Anonymous Cowards who have been convinced after watching the teevee for too long that all science is really a scam to squander their tax dollars on foolishness like basic research that shows no promise of an immediate economic benefit such as a drug that makes your peepee harder.

In response to your question, you might be able to maintain a botched occupation for a few hours with the money.

Re:Let the mantle come to us...

[GeoGreg (631708)]

The stuff that comes out of volcanoes is not pure mantle material. In fact, usually it's melted crustal material. Or some mixture of mantle and crustal material. Only occasionally do volcanoes cough up a hunk of mantle. More usually, we can look at pieces of mantle that may have gotten caught up in some tectonic process and been uplifted for us to see. But that's rare, and the rocks are often altered by other processes.