Jakarta –
Five years ago, scientists created an interactive map model that could show where we would emerge if we dug our way through the Earth.
Most of the answers are ‘somewhere in the ocean’. But if you think about it again, is it possible to dig the Earth until it comes out the other side of the Earth?
Various teams of scientists have tried to dig into the Earth before. China recently began digging a hole 10,000 meters deep into the Earth, which is the deepest hole ever carried out in the country.
By excavating 10 layers of rock, the team hopes to find rocks from the Cretaceous Period, a layer known as the Cretaceous System that is 145 million years old.
The hole, although very deep, is not the deepest man-made hole on Earth. The title goes to the Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia.
The project, which lasted from May 24 1970 until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw the deepest branch of the hole reach 12,263 meters below the surface.
The team discovered that the rocks deep beneath the Earth were much wetter than they expected. Before drill holes were discovered, scientists thought water would not penetrate rock that deep.
They also hope to find a basalt layer beneath the continent’s granite, as this is the layer found in oceanic crust. Instead, they found that beneath the igneous granite was metamorphic granite.
Since the continental crust is made entirely of granite, this is evidence of plate tectonics, a theory that only began to be accepted when they started digging drill holes.
Even though it sounds quite deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole team and the latest research team in China have not succeeded in penetrating the Earth’s lithosphere (crust) to reach the mantle.
The Earth’s crust on land varies. On average, it is about 30 kilometers thick, although under the mountains it can reach 100 kilometers. Under the ocean, the thickness does not vary much and is an average of 6-7 kilometers thick.
Even though less of the Earth’s crust needs to be dug beneath the ocean, adding factors like keeping the drilling steady makes the process very complicated.
As quoted from IFL Science, if we try to drill into the Earth, there will likely be even worse complications. The main problem is high pressure and heat.
Doug Wilson, a geophysicist and researcher at California University, Santa Barbara, said that for every 3 meters of depth, extra atmospheric pressure is added.
For example, when digging about 6,370 kilometers into the center of the Earth, the pressure will become very strong, to be precise 1,179,423,669,639,374,797 hectoPascals (hPa), with the standard pressure at sea level being 1,013 hPa.
If someone dared to jump into the hole, at this pressure the air and humans would most likely become superfluid, aka melt like soup.
Additionally, the temperatures the drilling machine will encounter may not be able to handle it, considering the inner core is at 5,200 degrees Celsius. Wilson argued that continuous pumping of water would help cool the drill bit, but it likely would not work. When we reach the outer core, it will be like drilling through fluid.
Meanwhile, the Earth’s inner core will be dense, not because of lower temperatures but because of strong pressure. Although modern drilling equipment has likely been perfected, even if humans were able to pass through this core of iron and nickel material, they would be rewarded with a state of weightlessness, where the mass of the Earth pulls humans evenly in all directions, before a long arduous effort passes through. until we penetrate to the other side of the Earth. Is it possible?
Watch the video “M 6.2 earthquake in China, more than 100 people died”
(rns/afr)
2023-12-28 02:45:07
#earth #hollowed #penetrates
