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The $1 billion mission to reach the Earth's mantle
- mparlane 14y agoReminds me of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole "Because Russia"
- archon 14y ago"Because science isn't always cheap and doesn't always produce immediately obvious benefits."
- arbuge 14y agoFor some amusing stuff related to the Kola hole, google "well to hell" :-)
- Lagged2Death 14y agohttp://www.damninteresting.com/the-deepest-hole/ http://www.damninteresting.com/the-deepest-hole/
- BklynJay 14y agoWho else is expecting the chief scientist on the project to say: "What could possibly go wrong?" :)
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI remember as a kid some of the conspiracy theories about how the US cut off and then classified all the deep drilling work in the late 60's [1]. I had a chance early on in the 80's to invest in a company that had designed a new drill head (one of my USC alums went to work there), I thought it was a silly investment I mean drill bits? really? But they did quite well with it. That said, the whole concept of just digging and digging until you hit the middle holds childlike fascination for me. [1] Mostly related to discovering alien artifacts and the like.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 14y agoModern drill "downhole systems" are fascinating technology with interesting and challenging engineering going on. Even transmission of data uses interesting techniques. (http://www.nov.com/Downhole/Directional_Tools/MWD_Systems/BlackStar_EM-MWD.aspx http://www.nov.com/Downhole/Directional_Tools/MWD_Systems/Bl...)
- zem 14y agoi'm really excited about the medium-term promise of abundant geothermal energy
- ChuckMcM 14y agoAs am I although there is pretty damning evidence in Sonoma County [1] California that you can cause earthquakes with it. That said, I'm surprised we've not seen more closed loop systems [2][3]. My favorite is to take a loop of tungsten tubing a reservoir, a cooling tower, and a turbo pump and toss the tubing into the magma flow of a volcano. Pull out enough heat to run a turbine but not much that you freeze the lava. I'm totally going for this concept in my Mad Scientist Power Base. [1] http://www.geysers.com/ http://www.geysers.com/ [2] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html [3] http://www.atlanticgeothermal.com/about/what-we-do.html http://www.atlanticgeothermal.com/about/what-we-do.html
- pizu 14y agoWhy not probe samples from a volcano, instead ???
- TeMPOraL 14y agoBecause we want to know what's down there, not what comes up here.
- catenate 14y agoWithout adequate safeguards, what's down there will come up here (at least to the top of the borehole), and create a new 6km volcano. I'd name it Moria.
- felipemnoa 14y agoSo, If you want to create your own island in the middle of nowhere all you have to do is drill a couple of holes to the mantle. I can certainly see some people creating islands this way in the hope of using them decades latter.
- Evbn 14y agoSuperman movie.
- derekp7 14y agoI don't think it works like that. If you are in the middle of an ice burg and drill down to the ocean below it, does water start shooting up through the hole?
- catenate 14y agoYes, if the bottom of the iceberg-hole is below sea level. If the mantle at the bottom of this new bore-hole is under pressure and liquid, then it will go up the bore hole until the pressure above it equals the pressure below. If the bottom of the bore-hole hits a part of a liquid mantle with a lot of pressure, then we might get a volcano. Hence, Moria.
- petenixey 14y agoWhat happens when you hit the mantle? Does the rock come out or solidify in the pipe, how does the drill cope with the heat?
- brentm 14y agopretty sure no one has any real idea only theories. hopefully it doesn't start some crazy volcano that eventually engulfs everything. when this planet does go the way of the buffalo it likely will be our own fault.
- sharkweek 14y agoI was secretly hoping for that Russian drill team in the arctic tapping into that frozen lake to unleash some sort of crazy frozen, earth-destroying demon/alien Perhaps I will shift my wishes to this mantle quest to unlease some fiery, earth-destroying demon/alien.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI would expect it to be Cthulhu, myself. So, maybe not fiery, but earth-destroying demon/alien fits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
- anonymfus 14y agoYou will like this Doctor Who episode if you didn't see it yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Doctor_Who) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Doctor_Who)
- nnnnni 14y agoThe first thing that came to mind was this one: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS31E08TheHungryEarth http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS31E08T...
- bobwaycott 14y ago
- anonymouz 14y agoContrary to the claim of the article, $1 billion to get samples from the Earth's mantle does not sound particularly expensive. Especially if compared to all the other things that we nowadays spend billions on, and where the long-term benefit is much less clear.
- samstave 14y agoWe should have mandates that deep drilling for oil should carry a requirement to assist in some of this research. "Want mining/mineral rights? Then you must provide this [data] as a part of allowance for access"
- jofer 14y agoTo be fair, they (the oil industry) already developed pretty much _all_ of the technology in question. Scientific drilling just applies the oil industry's methods to academic projects. (There are a few exceptions, particularly with regards to coring.) Furthermore, the companies that provide the expertise in question are the service companies (e.g. Schlumberger, Halliburton, etc), not the companies that are directly in search of oil.
- samstave 14y agoWe are in agreement and I understand, my point; I am tired of the outright corruption in all industries and the massive profit and exploitation of the oil companies. I as a citizen demand that the representatives in government require a "benficial tax" on all commercial endeavors: the big corporations are not paying financial taxes, then they must begin to pay a beneficial tax to society. This is a tax on research requirements, innovation, infrastructure and other methods of physical payment that are immune to loopholes.
- justincormack 14y agoYou know that most oil is now produced by government owned companies? Look at China Norway Venezuela Russia Saudi Arabia etc...
- habosa 14y ago"It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations" Wow, that quote really put it all into perspective for me.
- jofer 14y agoAnd to put it in even more prespective, we're just talking about drilling through the equivalent of the skin of an apple.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- samspot 14y agoI'm ok with it as long as Gordon Freeman isn't involved.
- aik 14y agoIf the hole is only 30cm wide, and it's going to take 8 years to complete (complete in 2020), isn't there a decent chance that there will be movement in the plates that will close up the hole?
- hollerith 14y agoIf they take care not to drill through any faults, which I expect they will, then the whole hole will move as one.
- fleitz 14y agoOnly 10 times the cost of making a movie about reaching the core.
- hammock 14y agoMy first thought (before reading) was that this was a commercial mining operation, in the vein of asteroid mining missions, etc.
- gajomi 14y ago>"It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations," says Teagle. If this is indeed an accurate analogy than I would be very interested to see it done as a proof of concept!
- songzme 14y agoWhat is the earth explodes? Earth was designed to keep the very hot stuff inside a very hard container. If we break this container by drilling through it, the hot stuff will explode and humanity will get hurt.
- dclowd9901 14y ago> It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide Can someone clean up this horrible analogy?
- grannyg00se 14y agoHow about....dangling piano wire from a twenty story highrise rooftop down into a test tube.
- robomartin 14y agoI'll admit to being utterly ignorant about deep-hole drilling. If I was tasked with doing something like that I'd do two things: 1- I would not do it in the ocean Lots of reasons, from the potential to damage an ecosystem to the unknowns that could be catastrophic in so many ways. Of course, cost is another reason. Doing anything in the ocean --particularly deep-- is incredibly difficult and expensive. 2- I would not use a ten mile long shaft with a drill at the end of it. I just don't think that this is the way to do it. Again, I am ignorant when it comes to drilling of this sort. What I would do would be to design a drilling robot that would drill the hole and burrow itself down the hole as it works. To continue with the overly simplistic view, the only thing this robot would need would be power (lots of it). You select a candidate site and build a large solar array, large enough to power the drill-bot. A starter hole of the required depth and diameter would be drilled via conventional means. The robot would then be inserted into it. It would expand and clamp itself to the hole to begin drilling deeper. If the broken-up dirt and rocks must be removed either the robo-drill has the capability to collect some amount of it and traverse back to the surface or it comes back and a "cleanup" robot would go down to get the stuff out. It'll take a long time? Is that a problem? The operation could probably have a good degree of automation. Probably a horrible idea. Don't know.
- jofer 14y agoJust for the sake of explanation, here are some of the reasons (I'm a geophysist, currently working in the oil industry, but my dissertation work relied heavily on the Chikyu (the ship in question)): 1: The ocean is the only place where it's feasible. The continents have much, much thicker crust (40-70km) than the ocean basins (7-15km). Areas of exposed oceanic crust (e.g. Iceland) have much thicker than normal oceanic crust. Beyond that, it's (slightly) easier to "drill" through water than through rock. There are a still a _lot_ of challenges involved in deep-water riser drilling. You don't just have a what's basically a steel rod going down (as you would with riserless drilling), you have to have a system that's capable of returning fluids and maintaining high pressure going all the way down to the seafloor (and below, once you case the well). However, it's still faster to deploy the riser than it is to drill through solid rock. At any rate, I'm getting sidetracked. The locations where they're looking to drill to the moho are in relatively shallow water (3-4 km) compared to the water depths that the Chikyu has already drilled in. 2: You're misunderstanding how drilling works. :) In some sense, what you've described is exactly how it works. (Just think of the drillbit as the robot.) However, you have to overcome the pressures at the depth you're drilling at (otherwise the hole will collapse, among other things) and you need an efficient way to return the cuttings (waste material) to the surface. Thus: drilling mud. You circulate pressurized (and very dense, so that the pressure increases with depth) fluid that flushes the cuttings back to the surface and keeps the borehole open. (It's an oversimplification, but that's the basic idea.) In some cases (e.g. coil tubing rigs), this fluid is even what drives the drillbit. At any rate, hopefully that helps illuminate things a touch. :)
- Angelo8000 14y agoWhat are you going to do once you get there?
- its_so_on 14y agois there a business plan here? . . . . (this is a joke :) )