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Scientists Drill for the Earth’s Mantle (Video)
Scientists Drill for the Earth’s Mantle (Video)

Scientists Drill for the Earth’s Mantle (Video)

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.

However, a new endeavor is currently underway as the crew of the drill ship JOIDES Resolution work on a location in the Indian Ocean known as “Atlantis Bank.” A stable patch of ocean crust, the site is only 2300 feet below the water’s surface — making it a reasonably easy stretch to reach — and it is believed that there the mantle actually rises above the Moho border, another optimal amenity.

Reaching the mantle and obtaining an undisturbed sample could be a vital achievement, as it could help science better understand the early make-up of the Earth, as geophysicist Holly Given of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego tells Smithsonian, “It would be ground-truth for what the world is made of.” Any samples ever previously found were exposed to air or water, which likely altered composition. Mankind has yet to examine an undisturbed specimen of mantle material.

According to the JOIDES Resolution’s website, the expedition is scheduled to continue until January 30, 2016, although Smithsonian has stated that as of Friday, the drilling had only reached about halfway through the crust — but a second mission has been approved, with the eventual goal of reaching the mantle potentially as distant as five years from launch.

Agencies/Canadajournal




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    One comment

    1. As they said in the video, the crust, where we live, is heated by the core of our planet. We are in fact, sitting on a Red Hot glowing ember floating in space with only a very thin layer of rock (ceramic insulation), to protect us from all that heat.

      And yet modern Climate Science, and I use the term “science” very loosely here, completely ignores This, the real source of most of the heat here at the surface and tells us that the Sun is the main source of heat? What, that little 100 Watt light bulb, at 150 Million Kilometers away? It is no wonder they have had to resort to using opinion/consensus to justify their claims, since the science and theories don’t work.

      The interior of our planet is the main source of heat, here at the surface. That internal heat is what determines climate and until this very simple fact is understood, climate will never be!

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