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SALT LAKE CITY — Human beings are used to doing the impossible.
For much of history, land exploration has ruled the day, but technological and scientific advances have made space exploration the priority over the past half-century. What remains a mystery is what lies beneath our own feet — but scientists hope that is about to change.
Geologists now hope to drill 3.7 miles beneath the seafloor to reach Earth's mantle, the 2,000-mile-thick layer of hot, solid rock between Earth's crust and it's molten core. The cost of the mission is $1 billion and will require a team of international scientists to drill through the rock with 6.2-mile-long drill pipes, which project co-leader Damon Teagle told CNN will be "the most challenging endeavor in the history of Earth science."
The drill will make a hole only 11 inches in width all the way through the crust.
"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," Teagle said.
Such a journey has long been a goal of scientists, but the technology has not existed to make such a feat possible until recently. Now, a Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel equipped with six miles of drilling pipe has set a new drilling-depth record, suddenly making reaching Earth's mantle an attainable reality.
The task will be an expensive one, and drill bits will have to be replaced after 50–60 hours of use, according to the Smithsonian Institute. But the implications are enormous — equivalent to the Apollo moon missions, according to scientists. Samples brought above ground through drilling would greatly aid our understanding of how the Earth was formed.
Drilling is expected to begin as early as 2020, with missions beginning as early as November in the Pacific Ocean.
What is known today about the Earth's mantle has come from samples collected from volcanic eruptions, which are inaccurate representations due to the journey they undertake to reach Earth's surface, according to National Geographic.
There have been attempts in the past to obtain samples of mantle, the first of which being Project Mohole, which was abandoned in 1966 after managing to penetrate only 590 feet. And an oceanic borehole in 2005 only managed to reach a depth of about 4,600 feet.
