The most central part of the Earth’s interior would require drilling approximately which is 6,370 kilometers (20,898,950 ft)
The deepest drilling ever conducted in world history is only 12 kilometers (39370,1 ft)
Why is so hard and and is the effort worth it? Or we only will find more rocks ?
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Extremely absurd amounts of pressure, the deeper you go. You have the collecting weight of all that dirt and rock trying to collapse in on the hole. Then, as you go even deeper, it becomes fluid and moves, and then becomes extremely hot as well, which will melt the equipment.
Even besides all the insane issues with digging to the core, can you imagine even digging horizontally through mountain for 4000 miles?!? That way further than crossing the entire United States
One of the first challenges is that once you get to a certain depth, the heat and pressure begin to affect how the rock behaves. Suddenly it’s less solid and has a texture more like a chewy caramel or a thick dough. This means that our typical methods of drilling stop working as we can’t cut it or otherwise remove it from our path. All the rock does is bend and twist around our drill. More importantly that same heat and pressure starts to weaken any metal drills we have in the hole. And that’s only the middle part of Earth’s outer crust. Once we reach the mantle, the gooey inner part of the planet, the heat and pressure are so immense that not many materials we possess could survive. Much less anything we would be able to form a useful drill with.
There’s a story about Russians who had a big plan to just drill to the center of the earth. The reason they stopped was they said it got extremely hot. Too hot to handle really.
We technically could.. with a chain of nuclear explosions carefully placed to evacuate as much ground as possible. But no one is insane enough to try that for obvious reasons.
In addition to what others have put, the earth can also have voids(holes) which can collapse around the drill(I’ve seen video of these where someone was trying to drill into an earthquake fault line)
Drilling horizontally for 6,400 km is completely beyond our current capabilities. The longest tunnels are less than 100 km, and they often have intermediate access shafts to the surface. And going down is much, much harder – you have to lift the excavated material back up, you have to stop the tunnel collapsing under ever-increasing sideways pressure, it gets hot enough to melt most materials, etc.
Traditional drilling techniques (like a metal drill breaking up the rock) are unfeasible because of what others have said about temperature, pressure and changes in the “state” of matter.
A point I haven’t seen mentioned is that with drills, there is also a need to constantly transport the material removed back to the surface. The deeper you go, the more difficult this becomes.
There is an interesting new concept that tries to use directed energy “drill”, vaporising rock with energy instead of grinding it up with a solid drill. It is nowhere near guaranteed that it’ll work, but they got enough funding to try.
[link to the project at ARPA (civilian DARPA) ](https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/millimeter-wave-technology-demonstration-geothermal-direct-energy-drilling)
Geologist/petroleum engineer here.
While everyone here is discussing the physical properties of the Earth that make drilling impossible, not many are addressing the logistical challenges involved.
The Merco 58 was one of the largest drilling rigs in the 1980s. It managed to drill about 3 wells before the oil industry took a downturn, leading to its dismantling for scrap. The drawworks of the oil rig were capable of lifting 180,000 feet of drill pipe, with sizes stepping down. However, the weight of such an extensive amount of drill pipe wasn’t feasible due to the risk of it pulling apart under its own weight.
On Earth, we are constrained to drilling to around 40,000 feet. Beyond this point, gravity exerts enough force to cause the drill pipe to break apart, and currently, we lack materials that could withstand this pressure.
Interestingly, on the Moon, a drilling rig as powerful as the Merco could theoretically drill up to 6 times as deep as on Earth due to the Moon’s lower gravity.
OK.
Drilling just 2 miles deep is like inflating a party balloon next to the Titanic.
The deeper you go in the ocean, it gets more and more pressure so almost no vehicles can go down there even with 6 inch thick walls. Well, rock does the same thing. and drills don’t have 6 inch thick wall. And rock weighs much more than water.
Yes, I know that the small radius of a Drill can hold back much more pressure, but it’s still true 3 or 4 miles down,
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