In de Indische oceaan zal een nieuwe poging ondernomen worden om door de aardkorst en de moho, de mantel in te boren. Dit soort pogingen worden sinds de zestiger jaren ondernomen, maar faalden steeds wegens financiële problemen of omdat de geologie verder boren onmogelijk maakte.
Wil je hier meer van lezen kijk dan op:
http://www.nature.com/news/quest-to-drill-into-earth-s-mantle-restarts-1…
of bekijk het filmpje op:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny31rW0Ftr4
Posted by timothy on Thursday December 03, 2015 @04:18PM from the pardon-have-you-seen-my-ring? dept.
schwit1 writes: An expedition to the Indian Ocean is about to begin an effort to drill a core down through the Earth’s crust and into its mantle. Geologists have been trying to drill through the contact between the crust and the mantle, called the Moho, since the 1960s, with no success. Either the projects have gone way over budget and been shut down, have failed due to engineering problems, or were stopped by the geology itself. This last issue is maybe the most interesting: “Expeditions have come close before. Between 2002 and 2011, four holes at a site in the eastern Pacific managed to reach fine-grained, brittle rock that geologists believe to be cooled magma sitting just above the Moho. But the drill could not punch through those tenacious layers. And in 2013, drillers at the nearby Hess Deep found themselves similarly limited by tough deep-crustal rocks.” This new project hopes to learn from these past problems to obtain the first rock samples from below the Earth’s crust. (Here’s an eccentric introduction to the Hess Deep rift.)