Jakarta – Scientists have successfully drilled into the lower mountains and extracted part of the Earth’s mantle. This is the first time in the world.
Quoting from detikInet, scientists drilled the Atlantis Massif or Mount Atlantis, a mountain located in the North Atlantic Ocean. Drilling was carried out from a ship named Joides Resolution.
Geologists were able to drill a hole 1,267 meters deep into the mountain. It then extracted a staggering amount of serpentinite rock samples from Earth’s interior.
This is not the deepest drilling ever carried out into the ocean floor and is not technically digging into the Earth’s mantle either. The researchers took advantage of the ‘tectonic window’, an area where mantle rock is pushed above its usual place. They drilled into it and extracted the material.
“On Earth, mantle rock is normally very difficult to access. The Atlantis Massif offers the rare advantage of gaining access to it, as it consists of mantle rock that is brought closer to the surface,” the researchers wrote in their blog, citing detikInet from Live Science, Friday (9/6/2023).
Scientists have been trying to extract Earth’s mantle since 1961. At that time, scientists at the Mohole Project drilled in the Pacific Ocean to reach the Mohorovicic discontinuity, the area where the Earth’s crust gives way to the mantle. Unfortunately, the project’s drill only reached 183 m below the seabed before sinking. A number of subsequent offshore drilling attempts also failed.
The mission aims to study chunks of the Earth’s mantle for clues to processes such as volcanism and magnetic fields. The geologists from the International Ocean Discovery Program on this mission actually do not aim to extract the mantle core, but examine the origins of life on Earth.
Massive rocks contain olivine which reacts with water, which is called serpentinization to produce hydrogen, an important food source for microbes. When they drilled into horizontal faults in the ocean floor, scientists were able to extract mantle rock cores.
This article has been published on detikInet, read in full here
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2023-06-10 18:00:00
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