Also: some poor sod’s keys.
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In the video a control-panel with Cyrillic letters is used to visualize an American invention …
I would guess that the outer solid rocky layers are much better insulation than the inner partially liquid layers that can have convective heat transport. That would suggest that the greatest temperature gradient be near the surface.
On the other hand, according to national geographic:
That means the earth’s core is (in places) hotter than the surface of the sun (5500° Celsius)!
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Not as deep as the one bunkerbiatch has dug my country into
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Wow, that’s really cool that parts of the inner earth are hotter than parts of the sun. Also, the earth has been cooling for 4+ billion years, and it is still this hot.
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Even Pluto may be comparatively warm inside.
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Me, thinking on COVID and all the BS in the World and this hole
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It doesn’t seem that infeasible to use a metal sleeve, which would hardly be troubled by 180°C. At least, the actual quantity of metal isn’t prohibitive when you’re only talking about a 20cm pipe.
Though I suppose that’s relative, and perhaps having a very deep hole just isn’t worth very much in practical terms.
It does seem like a waste of geothermal power not to do anything with it once you’ve made it, though. It could at least power a spa hotel of some kind.
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Will they be crisp around the edges and chewy in the middle, though?
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Just because a metal doesn’t melt at 180C doesn’t mean it isn’t affected. You can look up the thermal coefficient of Young’s modulus for metals easily. Ceramics are actually better in that direction; they’re typically more brittle but that actually improves as they get hot. Eventually everything fails, though, and with temperature and pressure both rising it’s still a race.
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Since they started drilling so long ago, Putin didn’t get the chance to make it just a bit wider, for reasons.
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13:30 minutes of unrelated stock footage, < 12 seconds consisting of 3 still photos of the actual borehole, with a narration that was basically cribbed from Wikipedia.
Are you trolling me, BoingBoing?
Signed,
A Very Grumpy man is Very Grumpy
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In 2009 the Icelanders accidentally drilled into magma at Krafla in North East Iceland. The project had been drilling on the edge of the geothermal fluid looking for supercritical water that would allow for more efficient geothermal power. They didn’t expect to find magma at just 2km, but it was probably an intrusion from the major eruptions at Krafla in the 1970s and 1980s. Not content with that, they pumped water down the well to see what would happen. Disappointingly for Hollywood, nothing exploded. The well wasn’t intended for commercial power so it was capped and abandoned.
A second super-deep geothermal well was bored at Reykjanes by the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (http://iddp.is) which is a consortium of Icelandic power companies with the aim of going to 5km in order to reach supercritical geothermal fluids. The well was taken down to 4.7km into rocks of more than 400C which were found to be suitably permeable for geothermal power.
The experiment is now being relocated to Krafla to see if the same conditions can be found in that geothermal field.
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shortcut
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Unlike boring into the Earth’s crust, that hole does reach Hell.
Big enough for your cellphone and car keys.
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Exactly what I came to say
I could have listened to gossip and gotten more actual information.
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Oh great, now I have anxiety about it again.
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My socks, finally I know where they must’ve gone!
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I guess if you accidentally drop those into it you don’t care whether the hole is 12km deep or only 1km.
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Glad I read the comments first. Thank you!
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