A massive floating laboratory is attempting to drill through four miles of seabed to take samples of the Earth’s mantle
Posted 04.01.2010 at 3:37 pm
21 Comments
The Deepest Drill
CHIKYU RESEARCH VESSEL Cost: $540 million Current Maximum depth: 23,000 feet ft. below seafloor Crew: 150: 50 crew, 50 drilling techs and engineers, 50 scientists and lab techs Drill string components: 1,000 31-ft. segments of pipe Drill string Assembly:3 hrs.
Coherentimages.com
The world’s deepest drill is about to get taller—tall enough to dig into Earth's mantle. Already, the Chikyu research vessel is capable of fetching samples at depths of 23,000 feet below the seabed, two to four times that of any other drill. In 2007, off the coast of Japan, it became the first mission to study subduction zones, the area between tectonic plates that is the birthplace of many earthquakes. Over the next three years, scientists will tack on at least an extra mile of drill and attempt the most ambitious mission ever: piercing the Earth’s mantle. There, scientists expect to find the same conditions as those in the early Earth—and perhaps the same life-forms that thrived then.
Design Highlights of the Chikyu Research Vessel
Blowout Preventer: This five-story machine sits on top of the borehole and monitors the intricate balance of pressure within. If it detects a sudden increase in pressure, it can seal off select valves or the entire hole to prevent an explosion. Coherentimages.com
foot-wide opening in the bottom of the ship.
Riser Pipe: A four-foot-diameter steel pipe called a riser connects the ship to the borehole. Outside the riser are several hoses and smaller pipes for recirculating the synthetic mud and controlling the blowout preventer. The riser’s inner hollow core (a pipe within a pipe) is reserved for the drill string. At a 1.6-mile depth, the assembled riser weighs 1,000 tons.
Planned Upgrades
To drill in deeper waters, engineers will either replace the steel riser with one made from a lightweight material like carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic or they will use two pipes—one for the drill string and a second, small-diameter pipe to return the spent drilling mud back up to the ship for recycling.
For deeper ground penetration, where temperatures can exceed 500°F and corrosive chemicals reside, engineers will use a higher-tensile-strength steel to build the drill string. Also in development are new drilling muds that cool the drill bit during operation.
How to Reach the Mantle
1. Get in Position Using GPS and transponders on the ocean floor, the ship’s positioning system measures the forces acting on the craft, such as wind, wave and current direction and speed. Six computer-controlled propellers will keep the ship from drifting more than 15 feet in any direction.
2. Assemble Drill To break through the first layer of crust, the crew deploys a steel pipe with an 11-inch-wide drill bit at the bottom. The crew attaches new lengths of pipe one by one from the top until the “drill string” is long enough to hit the seafloor.
3. Start Drilling As the drill bit burrows through sediment and rock, a hose in the drill pipes in a synthetic mud to keep the drill cool and the borehole open under the crushing pressures found at those depths.
4. Collect Rocks Every few hundred feet, scientists collect rock samples for study. A narrow barrel with a razor-sharp edge (think of a very big apple corer) shoots down and pierces the undrilled layer of earth below. The 31-foot-long core samples are analyzed for their chemical and magnetic properties.
Synthetic Mud: A viscous cocktail of minerals, polymers and seawater stabilizes the borehole walls. Because the mud is expensive and could be harmful to ocean life, it is recycled back to the ship during drilling. Coherentimages.com
21 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Popular Tags
Technology
|
|
|
|
|
|
July 2013: The Future Of Flight
The incredible innovations, like drone swarms and perpetual flight, bringing aviation into the world of tomorrow. Plus: today's greatest sci-fi writers predict the future, the science behind the summer's biggest blockbusters, a Doctor Who-themed DIY 'bot, the organs you can do without, and much more.
.jpg)
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Technology
- Green Light For Plan To Build World's Tallest Building At Record Speed
- Why The U.S. Won't Dare Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike
- Counterpoint: The U.S. Could Totally Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike
- U.S. Government Uses Early Knowledge Of Microsoft Bugs For Spying
- Congress Was Not Really Briefed On PRISM
- A Concise History Of The NSA's Online Spying Program PRISM
- Who's More Powerful, China Or The United States? [Infographic]
- Why Government Phone Spying Is Really About Big Data
- Watch This Insane Helicopter-Bike Fly Around
- Designers Spruce Up The Government's Crappy PowerPoint
Most Emailed
Technology
- Scenes From Asia's First 3-D-Printed Fashion Show
- A 3-D Printed Fashion Show Inspired By Birds
- Counterpoint: The U.S. Could Totally Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike
- How Surveillance Has Evolved In The United States [Timeline]
- A Brief History Of The Demise Of Battle Bots
- Nursing Home Tracks Residents' Every Move
- Researchers Can Now "Hear" The Exact Shape Of A Room
- Designers Make City Noise Actually Sound Good
- All Of America's Waterways On One Map [Infographic]
- The 6 Most Important Things We Learned From Edward Snowden's Guardian Q&A
Most Viewed
Technology
- Scenes From Asia's First 3-D-Printed Fashion Show
- A 3-D Printed Fashion Show Inspired By Birds
- Counterpoint: The U.S. Could Totally Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike
- How Surveillance Has Evolved In The United States [Timeline]
- A Brief History Of The Demise Of Battle Bots
- Nursing Home Tracks Residents' Every Move
- Researchers Can Now "Hear" The Exact Shape Of A Room
- Designers Make City Noise Actually Sound Good
- All Of America's Waterways On One Map [Infographic]
- The 6 Most Important Things We Learned From Edward Snowden's Guardian Q&A
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
.JPG)
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ok thats all good and fine, seems a little bit like a waste of time/money to me tbo but *shrugs*
Just dont let any water get in there/do NOT inject water into the mantle!!
I think there might be a typo in the article or someone forgot to convert meters to feet or something. It says:
"...the Chikyu research vessel is capable of fetching samples at depths of 2,890 feet below the seabed, two to four times that of any other drill."
Well... 2,890' is not that deep at all. Oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico of 30,000' are becoming more and more common every day now. Also, the article states that this drillship has "1,000 31-ft. segments of pipe" which would mean that it can drill to depths of 31,000'.
Newest generation drillships are now rated to 40,000'.
Remember the Wachowski's version of Zion in the Matrix? And the look of the drilling machines they created? Very cool... www.tendances-de-mode.com/en/
@fefillo I think you might be misinterpreting the information. It can drill almost three thousand feet below the sea floor. The number you have posted have nothing do to with the depth of the drill, rather they indicate just how far below the surface of the ocean they can go. Actual drilling depth is something else entirely.
@SJak Fefillo has a valid point. An MODU that operates in 17-400' ish feet of water can drill to 32kft easily with current equipment. Granted they hardly ever drill straight down (purposefully). Three thousand feet down is absolutely boring. Maybe exciting in 1952 or something.
Agree. I think the depth numbers are certainly wrong here ... probably another good reason for standardizing on SI units in a Science magazine to avoid confusion.
Oil & Gas industry can do these depths with it's eyes closed. 80% of this article is nothing new either.
42.
Anyone else wonder if a large amount of inner molten rock might some how dislodge some of the stone and make it outside the mantle?
Granted the pipe isn't very wide in terms of holes, but it doesn't take much for molten rock to push thru. Maybe they hit unexpected temperatures and it pushes past the drill or rock.
Either way, I think we need to go deeper and deeper. Would be cool!
Cool stuff...
Ivan Malagurski
Seems to be the case of a missing zero. A descriptive website said that in 2005 they drilled 7000 meters below the ocean floor -- so they're probably at 28,900 feet by now, and they want to go another 5000 feet ot so.
Still might not be the deepest. The Russians apparently drilled down 42000 feet quite some time ago (started in the early 60's). They didn't share much about their findings however.
Mother nature never got drilled this good, maybe we should buy her dinner!
The molemen really don't like these drills
lol @ demon cleaner!!!!
Why shouldn't they let water into the mantle?
I mean aside from the local blowout when it flashed to steam. It'd blow your pipe a few miles into the air. That could wreck your day.
Water is carried down with oceanic crust into the mantle all the time. There may actually be more water in the mantle than on the surface.
Of course, all that water does make for some interesting effects like making volcanoes more volatile near subduction zones.
I think the biggest danger here is pissing off a Balrog.
With the right drill, geothermal could power everything everywhere.
Hey guys, this is something special because you didn't notice that this drill sits on the sea bead and drills another 23,000 feet beyond that.
The deepest hole drilled was only 12262 metres. This drill starts under emmense pressure and possibly at that depth already.
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Just wait for the mantle to come to us.
Take a look at the 2D seismic section acquired 2009. (Google :deep derilling mantle japan" and click the "geophysical studies toward deep drilling through the oceanic crust link".)
The abyssal plain lies at 7 seconds (probably two way vertical travel time). Assuming 4200 ft/s for water velocity that gives us 2.78 miles to ocean bottom (value corrected to one way time). Just getting the bit to the bottom with riser and BOP will be a major technological feat.
The time measured normal to crustal secion, ocean bottom to moho, is at least another second. Similar back of envelope calc using crude velocity estimates based on geophysically determined velocities gives us 1.62 miles of crust. That's 4.4 miles of drill stem just to get close to moho.
I'll be interested in seeing the mineralogic interpretation and depths of mud log samples, core samples, fluid samples. and down hole logs. Not to mention the pressure and temperature profiles.
This will be very expensive . . . and fun! If they can do it.
Oops. I'm not an interpreter. It's 1 second to visible base of faulting. Looks like 2.5 seconds from ocean bottom to moho. So, crustal section is closer to 8 miles thick. My velocities are probably too high so call it 6 miles to be on the low side. Anyway that makes it 8.78 miles of drill stem to get to moho. That's not feasible to me but I don't know beans about the composite materials mentioned in the article and even less about pushing tools.
It'll be interesting one way or the other.
Why not just drill/sample an active volcano?
why so stupid, this will lead the world to the end, this drill will cause a high pressure never ending explosion of lava, it is beyond our control, this is different than volcano. why volcano only explode once a time, because it has it own "valve". PLEASE STOP IT IMMEDIATELY, THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD. There many other methods of doing research,and certainly this is not the right way! someone need to stop this!!!