The $1 billion mission to reach the Earth's mantle

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/01/tech/mantle-earth-drill-mission/index.html?c=&page=1

by ssclafani • 14 years ago

165 78 14 years ago

edition.cnn.com

mparlane• 14 years ago

Reminds me of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

"Because Russia"

archon• 14 years ago

"Because science isn't always cheap and doesn't always produce immediately obvious benefits."

arbuge• 14 years ago

For some amusing stuff related to the Kola hole, google "well to hell" :-)

Lagged2Death• 14 years ago

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-deepest-hole/

BklynJay• 14 years ago

Who else is expecting the chief scientist on the project to say: "What could possibly go wrong?" :)

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I 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.

DanBC• 14 years ago

Modern 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/Bl...)

zem• 14 years ago

i'm really excited about the medium-term promise of abundant geothermal energy

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

As 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/

[2] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html

[3] http://www.atlanticgeothermal.com/about/what-we-do.html

pizu• 14 years ago

Why not probe samples from a volcano, instead ???

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

Because we want to know what's down there, not what comes up here.

catenate3• 14 years ago

Without 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.

ambertch• 14 years ago

I'd guess for purity reasons. Volcanic eruptions don't always come from the mantle - in fact think convection cells, the rising material actually comes from deep down

techas2• 14 years ago

Because the rocks extruded in a volcano suffer a lot of changes during its way up. Moreover, a mantle rock is composed by many different minerals. When temperature goes up, some minerals melt first. So, you expect the extruded magmas to be enriched in those minerals. The extruded rocks are not sampling the mantle properly. Of course they provide tons of information, but is not the same as having a fresh mantle rock.

s_baby• 14 years ago

Also the possibility of finding new life forms. We've found life drilling several miles down. How much further does it go?

petenixey• 14 years ago

What 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• 14 years ago

pretty 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• 14 years ago

I 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.

techas2• 14 years ago

The mantle is solid rock. In some special environments (mid-oceanic ridges, subduction zones, etc) you can expect to have some percentage of melted mantle rocks, but this is not the general case. We know that the mantle is solid because it can transmit shear seismic waves.

anonymouz• 14 years ago

Contrary 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.

sylvinus• 14 years ago

Do we know where the funding is coming from?

veemjeem• 14 years ago

I'm guessing much of the funding comes from the Japanese government. They funded the Chikyu project which resulted in a deep drilling robot they plan to reuse.

CountHackulus2• 14 years ago

Considering that the unit cost for a B2 bomber was $737M (a little over $1B with inflation), I'd say that this is a steal. Just think of things in recent days that have reached the $1B level. For this kind of science? I'd say we'd be stupid NOT to pay for it.

Retric3• 14 years ago

They only built 21 of them so a lot of R&D is included in that figure. Still, we have actually gotten a lot of use out of each of those B2's. If they had built 22 of them the 22nd would have not cost nearly as much.

While it's true B-52's do most of the actual bombing it's only after stealth aircraft like B2's take out air defenses that you can swap to using B-52 safely. Not to mention aircraft are just expensive for comparison a 747-8F: costs US$352 million. Where a B-52H: was only US$53.4 million in 1998 dollars.

PS: In theory long range missiles can take out air defenses there bloody expensive at US$569,000 to 1.4 million a pop vs. equally accurate smart bombs are a small fraction of that.

tjmc• 14 years ago

Agreed. Learning how to drill to effectively unlimited geothermal power reservoirs can't be a bad thing.

samstave4• 14 years ago

We 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"

jofer6• 14 years ago

To 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.

nancyhua• 14 years ago

Agreed. Although how many of these projects actually get done for the amount allotted? Maybe it'll end up costing 100B or not get done at all after spending 10B. Whenever anything costs more than like 1M, we get scope insensitivity and have no idea what we are paying for or what it's costing.

josteink• 14 years ago

Especially if compared to all the other things that we nowadays spend billions on

According to Apple, putting rounded corners on things with touch-screens will cost you a billion. So yeah.

d0ugal• 14 years ago

Yeah, its just like one instagram.

habosa• 14 years 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.

jofer6• 14 years ago

And to put it in even more prespective, we're just talking about drilling through the equivalent of the skin of an apple.

samspot• 14 years ago

I'm ok with it as long as Gordon Freeman isn't involved.

aik• 14 years ago

If 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• 14 years ago

If they take care not to drill through any faults, which I expect they will, then the whole hole will move as one.

fleitz• 14 years ago

Only 10 times the cost of making a movie about reaching the core.

hammock• 14 years ago

My first thought (before reading) was that this was a commercial mining operation, in the vein of asteroid mining missions, etc.

gajomi• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

What 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

How about....dangling piano wire from a twenty story highrise rooftop down into a test tube.

robomartin2• 14 years ago

I'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.

jofer6• 14 years ago

Just 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. :)

robomartin2• 14 years ago

My disclaimer was accurate: I am ignorant about these things. I going camping this weekend. Can't think of a better subject to Google while out there (gotta love coverage in California) and learn about.

RobotCaleb• 14 years ago

I read somewhere that the mud is not only used as you mentioned but also as a very low bitrate communications medium. Is this true?

TallboyOne• 14 years ago

In addition to what the other reply stated, you also need to replace drillbits often, which would turn the drillbot into basically how drilling is done now.

pycassa• 14 years ago

So your first reason is, you wouldn't do it in the ocean? But logically that would be where I start.. and my explanation is that drilling an ocean so to speak is much more easier than drilling actual land. So I have an advantage over you in a way that by the time you reach the depths of oceans on the land I would be further down. Sure it is trickier to operate under ocean and, there are additional costs, but I feel like the above stated benefit is enough of a reason to do it on the base of an ocean.

I too don't know much about drilling.

Angelo8000• 14 years ago

What are you going to do once you get there?

The $1 billion mission to reach the Earth's mantle

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