We are attempting to drill ten kilometers below the ocean floor in
order to sample the mantle. The history of deep cores is listed here
and we learn that the Moho discontinuity is fractured rock the is
water saturated but also saturated with hydrogen gas. This is
unexpected and suggestive. Recall Tommy Gold and his efforts to show
the planet is out gassing methane at the least. This infers a
hydrogen supply that can feed natural traps.
Thus any natural geological trap needs to be at least considered
although hydrogen will unfortunately escape too handily.
This project will run for several years until we have results.
Deep drilling
project digs into Earth’s structure and past
By Scott Sutherland
An international
marine research program, known as the Integrated Ocean Drilling
Program (IODP), is planning to drill down almost 10 kilometres
below the ocean floor in an attempt to reach the Earth's mantle. The
goal is to bring back uncontaminated samples of mantle rock for
study, which should help to give us a better understanding of Earth's
structure and formation.
Although we know a
lot about the interior of the planet, none of what we know is from
direct study of the layers below the crust. We know what we do by
studying four different things: how vibrations from earthquakes pass
through the planet, the rotation and inertia of the Earth, the study
of the Earth's magnetic field and laboratory experiments that tested
some of the processes that were thought to be going on in both the
mantle and core.
Previous attempts have
been made to drill down to the mantle.
Project Mohole was
a U.S.-led effort in the 1960s that tried to reach the Mohorovičić
discontinuity, which is the boundary between the Earth's crust and
the mantle (named for the seismologist that discovered it). The
attempt only drilled down to 183 m below the ocean floor — off
the coast of the Guadalupe Island, Mexico — before the U.S.
Congress canceled the project for being too expensive.
The Kola
Superdeep Borehole (KTB) was a Russian project that ran for 35
years, from 1970 to 2005, before being shut down by the Russian
government, also for being too expensive. The project still holds the
world record for deepest hole ever drilled and deepest artificial
point on Earth, which it set in 1989. Two other projects surpassed it
as 'deepest bore hole', first in 2009 and then in 2011. The KTB
project found some surprising results in its attempt, including
that the rocks in the Mohorovičić discontinuity, which they
expected to show a transition between granite and basalt rock, are
actually fractured and saturated with water, and the discovery of mud
flowing to the surface of the hole that was saturated with hydrogen
gas.
The IODP's mission to
reach the mantle is being run from the Japanese ship Chikyū,
which has already set a new record for deepest scientific ocean
drilling, reaching 2,466 m below the ocean floor on September 9th. If
the IODP succeeds, likely in 2020, it will bring back the first
uncontaminated samples of mantle rock, something that has been long
sought after by scientists. The closest so far has been samples
from volcanoes, but those are either contaminated by sea water or by
magma from closer to the surface.
Canada has been
involved in ocean drilling projects since 1995, when it joined the
Ocean Drilling Program, and has been a member of the IODP since 2004.
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