This worries me what if it sets off something awful. I know i dont know anything about it but i tend to agree with why?
-Ri commenting on Wired.
Well the why is possibly explained that the mantle explains earthquakes and the Japanese government is the major funder. One does not wonder why that might be?
Not to be out done Damon Teagle (the leader of the project) of Southampton University has this, epic piece of Douglas Adams, “consider a walnut in Reading and a satsuma in Johannesburg”
“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 one tenth of a millimetre wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few metres into the foundations,”
Why scientists need to say that sort of thing is beyond me.
Quite what Ri thinks they’ll find down there (Great Cthulhu?) is beyond me. I suspect they’ll find rocks and shit like that.
What springs to mind is the immortal words of one physicist recently:
“Anyone Who Thinks the LHC Will Destroy the World is a Twat.”
I bet those rocks will be a bit warm, too.
Didn’t the Dwarves unleash a Balrog by mining in the back story to the Lord of the Rings? Oh, wait, that wasn’t real.
This is roughly like drilling 0.1691 to 0.3382mm into a billiard ball to find out what it is made from.
This is roughly like drilling 0.1691 to 0.3382mm into a billiard ball to find out what it is made from.
For the billiard ball, I’m guessing some kind of polymer unless it is antique, in which case celluloid or ephalump tusk.
Planet earth is big enough, old enough and tough enough that anything we smart monkeys do will be unnoticed. This is the difference between our own monumental arrogance and the scale of our actual utter irrelevance.
Our drilling will have only an infinitesimally slight effect. In fact 1000 years after the extinction of mankind, it will be difficult to prove we even existed.
Result?
Nothing awful will result, although it’s possible we won’t learn that much either (which of course, is valuable information in and of itself). Then again, as with Cunard back in the great days of ocean cruises, “Getting There is Half The Fun”.
There’s nothing particularly new about this idea - even ignoring Jules Verne, the MOHOLE project from the early sixties was aiming at going to these kinds of depths.
Even if they were to bust thru’ into the upper mantle, the rocks believed to be pretty much solid in most places, but mechanically, even the lower crust is subject to creep - so it’s believed that the material they’ll encounter will be like rock pieces in a somewhat gooey substrate.
They’ll have to line the bore if they want to retract the head to replace cutters, all the while, drilling deeper into a material that isn’t rigid and will impede drill motion. Not much you can do in the way of lubricants either, once you get down near the Mohorovicic Discontinuity.
Their choice of drilling locations based on identifying atypical (=’easy’) environments might well limit them in the conclusions they can draw about the 99.99% of oceanic crust they eliminated from their sample.
Good luck to them, but if it all goes wrong, it’ll be more like the boringest Thunderbirds episode you ever sat thru’ rather than Lovecraft.
The location of R’lyeh is pretty well known from literature, and it ain’t nowhere near any known submarine zones, unless you believe that old fraud August Derleth. No worries about Cthulhu.
Dagon though …. hmmm.
BTW, if they’ve got that deep water drill ship on the open market they’ll be paying upwards of $500k per day.
Bod,
“the MOHOLE project”
“drilling deeper into a material that isn’t rigid and will impede drill motion. Not much you can do in the way of lubricants either, once you get down near the Mohorovicic Discontinuity.”
This is about buggering the seal of all prophets.