Five years ago, a popular interactive map showed you where you would emerge if you dug straight through the earth.
It’s kind of fun, even if the majority answer is “somewhere in the ocean.”But will it happen? Possible How to dig through the earth and pop out to the other side?
Various teams have previously attempted to drill into the earth. China recently began digging a 10,000 meter (32,808 ft) hole into the earth, the deepest the country has ever attempted. The researchers hope to dig through 10 layers of rock to reach a layer known as the Cretaceous, a period of rock dating back 145 million years.
Although this hole is surprisingly deep, it is not the deepest man-made hole on Earth. That title is given to the Kola ultra-deep well, located on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. This project lasted from May 24, 1970 until just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when he reached the deepest part of the hole. 12,263 meters (40,230 feet) underground.
Researchers have discovered that rocks deep underground on Earth are much wetter than expected. Before the discovery of boreholes, scientists thought that water would not penetrate very deeply into rocks.so were they Expect it They discovered that beneath the continental granite there was a layer of basalt. This is what is found in the oceanic crust. Instead, they found metamorphic granite beneath the igneous granite. This was evidence of plate tectonics, as the continental crust was granite all the way down. I started recently It was supposed to be accepted when they started digging boreholes.
That sounds pretty deep, but the Kola ultra-deep boring team and a new team in China came nowhere close to breaking through the Earth’s lithosphere (crust) to reach the mantle.
The Earth’s crust on land changes.upon average It is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) thick, but can reach 100 kilometers (62 miles) under mountain ranges.Under the ocean there is not much change, it is average 6-7 km (3.7-4.3 miles) thick. Although there is less crust to drill under the sea, additional factors such as stabilizing the drill can make the process smoother. nightmarishly complicated.
However, there are many more nightmarish complications to expect when attempting to drill into the earth. The main issues are: mole personintense pressure and heat.
said Doug Wilson, a research geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. live science Every 3 meters (10 feet) adds extra pressure (toward the core, not away from it, of course). The pressure will be intense as it drills about 6,370 kilometers (3,960 miles) into the center of the Earth: 1,179,423,669,639,374,797 hectopascal Pressure (hPa) to be exact.The standard pressure at sea level is 1,013 hectopascals.
As pointed out in our article If you jumped into a hole through the earth, what would be the first thing that would die?at such pressure, the air and you will likely become superfluid and end your day in soup.
The temperatures faced by drilling equipment are probably insurmountable, with the inner core reaching temperatures of 5,200 degrees Celsius (9,392 degrees Fahrenheit). Wilson suggested that continuously pumping water would help cool the bit (but would likely not succeed), but once the outer core was reached it would be like drilling through liquid.
The inner core, on the other hand, is solid, but this is not due to a drop in temperature, but due to intense pressure. Your equipment may be hardened at this point, but if you manage to pass through this iron and nickel core, you’ll be briefly in a state of weightlessness, with the Earth’s mass being pulled evenly in all directions. . After that, it’s a long journey upwards. the other side.
[H/T: Live Science]