It might sound like a Jules Verne novel come to life, but a team of scientists are currently working on the very serious endeavor of drilling down toward the center of the Earth.
Rather than searching for prehistoric humans or herds of mastodons, the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) expedition 360 set out last month to drill deep below the floor of the Indian Ocean to try to reach the Earth’s mantle – a feat we have been trying to accomplish since the 1960s.
The mission set out to take “core samples and measurements from under the ocean floor, giving scientists a glimpse into Earth’s development and also a scientific means of measuring climate and environmental change throughout a significant part of our planet’s history,” the JOIDES Facebook page said.
More specifically, the crew planned to drill 1,500 meters (about 4,900 feet) into the Atlantis Bank gabbroic massif, where they suspect the mantle rises above the border where the crust and the mantle normally meets, also known as the Moho border. They team drilled to extract gabbros, or rocks that develop when slow-cooling magma is caught under the Earth’s surface, and crust-mantle transition to “understand the processes that produces mid-ocean ridge basalt,” among other things. The mission was expected to help find more information on magma, the Earth’s mantle, melt, and crust.
Credit: Thinkstock
But…
Unfortunately, the team wasn’t able to reach the mantle with its drill.
“We may not have made it to our goal of 1300 m, but we did drill the deepest ever single-leg hole into hard rock (789 meters), which is currently the 5th deepest ever drilled into the hard ocean crust,” said a post on the project’s official blog. “We also obtained both the longest (2.85 meters) and widest (18 centimeters) single pieces of hard rock ever recovered by the International Ocean Discovery Program and its predecessors!”
A second mission is currently being planned and experts have projected that humanity will reach the mantle within the next five years.
“Our hopes are high to return to this site in the not too distant future,” the blog post concluded.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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