That allows scientists to sample closer to the Earth's mantle. Read More. An unidentified machine being used for the Mohole Project Expedition Ship.
The expedition took place in and paved the way for future scientific drilling operations at sea. Scientific ocean drilling took off in the late s and early '60s with Project Mohole, a US attempt to drill to the base of the crust. It didn't get close -- drilling feet meters -- and to date the deepest a scientific vessel has drilled beneath the seafloor is 3, meters , by Japanese ship Chikyu in The moonshot of drilling through to the upper mantle remains a way off, but Koppers cautioned against fixating on the numbers game: "drilling a deep hole -- it's not that interesting.
It's what we can answer with that. Ocean drilling has provided evidence of the theory of plate tectonics the movement of the plates comprising Earth's rocky outer layer ; revealed the Arctic once had a subtropical climate; discovered frozen methane hydrate , a flammable ice; found microbial life deep beneath the sea floor.
Now Koppers and the scientific ocean drilling community is laying the groundwork for a literal breakthrough. For decades, the JOIDES Resolution, a year-old ex-oil drilling ship, has served as the community's primary vessel for deep ocean drilling.
Among the crew of were Laura Haynes, a sedimentologist and post-doctoral fellow at Rutgers University, and Elizabeth Sibert, a physical properties specialist and junior fellow at Harvard. David de Rothschild: Has 'Spaceship Earth' found its navigator? Working seven days a week rotating hour shifts for 60 days, it was no cruise for the 30 scientists at sea.
Drilling takes place all hours, with 9. Cores are then split lengthways and stored in a refrigerator for use in further research. In fact, it's this rock that ultimately erupts from volcanoes on the surface. At , meters, keep your eyes peeled for diamonds. They form when heat and pressure restructure the carbon atoms in this region.
Once you reach , meters, the rock is solid again, so it's back to the drill. You see, while it's still plenty hot at this depth to melt rock, the pressure is so extreme that the molecules inside literally can't move into a liquid state.
Then, by 3 million meters down, you'd reach Earth's third layer, the outer core. Unlike Earth's crust and mantle, the core is made of iron and nickel. Temperatures here are the same as the surface of the sun, hot enough to melt all that metal, so, yep, back to the propeller.
And it would have to be made out of some kind of supermaterial, because no known element has a melting point above 6, degrees Celsius. Making matters worse, the outer core also has low gravity, because, when you're that deep, much of the planet's mass is now above you, which produces a gravitational force that pulls away from the center.
So to continue, you'd need a super heat- and pressure-proof submarine that moves like rockets in space by shooting fuel out the back end. You'd soon arrive at the inner core, around 5 million meters below the surface.
The inner core is one giant sphere of solid iron, so it would definitely be challenging to get through. But if you did find a way, you'd soon hit the halfway point, about 6. More important, they may learn exactly how movement of the mantle's fluid rock affects the Earth's crust, in particular how the tectonic plates push and pull against one another [source: Cooper ] Knowing more about the mantle and how it interacts with the crust might someday even help us to predict events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions [source: Matsu'ura ].
But one of the most tantalizing possibilities is that scientists might actually find life deep inside the Earth. We're not talking about the monsters that Jules Verne imagined in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," but rather tiny, primitive organisms called extremophiles , which have evolved to resist extreme pressures and high temperatures such as the microscopic "worms from hell" found at the bottom of a South African gold mine.
Scientists already have found such organisms in the deepest ocean floor. If they're able to exist even deeper in the Earth, scientists speculate that such organisms might contain unique enzymes or other characteristics that researchers could put to use in developing biotechnology. Even more importantly, they might help us to understand the physiological limits of life [source: Osman ]. As a child in the s, I loved reading comic books, and one of my favorites was the Classics Illustrated version of Jules Verne's novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The vividness of that image contributed to my disappointment a few years later, when I learned in elementary school science class that the Earth was filled with molten rock, which seemed considerably less interesting. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Environmental Science.
Earth Science. What will scientists find when they make the real journey? Contents What Is the Earth's Mantle? What Is the Earth's Mantle? Sources American Museum of Natural History. People want to create some monitoring or analysis equipment, but we don't know We have to observe the Earth more precisely.
Three drilling sites are under consideration, Abe said, all of them in the Pacific Ocean. To access the mantle, the agency wants to use one of the most advanced drilling vessels currently available, the Chikyu. Japan's deep-sea drilling vessel, Chikyu, is anchored at a pier in Shimizu in
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