Let’s say hypothetically a giant hole suddenly opened up that went super deep into the Earth’s mantle or even its core. Let’s also ignore the fact that it will be scorching hot and filled with lava or water. Let’s just say it opens up, it’s dry land, and we start exploring it. I know that the atmospheric pressure would be greater. Would it be similar to the sea where the body would eventually be crushed at a certain depth? And would explorers be required to do something similar to how deep sea divers decompress when they ascend?
In: Physics
You’d die long before you got crushed, like for deep sea divers the various gases in the air become toxic.
At the bottom of a hole 10km deep the air pressure would be 3x the pressure of sea level. That’s when you start to get nitrogen narcosis.
If you replace nitrogen with helium you could get down to 55km (70x pressure) which is the current record for diving pressure.
Much more than that and oxygen gas itself starts to become toxic.
And yes you’d need to decompress as you came back up
Edit: just to add that the pressure at the deepest part of the ocean would be equal to air pressure in a 121km deep hole, so our best deep sea subs could potentially go down that far, but it’s only just past Earth’s crust.
[Source for the depths](https://www.mide.com/air-pressure-at-altitude-calculator)
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