What are the problems with drilling to the core of the earth?

Question

I've read a company in Asia intends to drill to the earth's core. What are the problems with this? Creating the hole? releasing gases, magma, etc? Destablization? Earthquake potentials? Gravity, mineral and liquid complications?

Answer 1

I would guess some stupid (by which I mean 'ill-educated') 'Reporter' got it wrong (as usual). I expect they are drilling the Earths crust = if they pick a thin spot they only need to go down 10 miles or so to reach the mantle.

However, in the spirit of the question ... well the core is about 4,000 miles from the surface ...

So I would say two major problems - one is finding a hard enough material to make you drill from (diamonds would melt & flow like water)

The second would be finding some way to keep on drilling (how do you force molten rock and iron up thousands of miles of drill pipe and prevent the hole collapsing under pressures of 3 million atmospheres ?).

Answer 2

Well the fact that most of the way down the 'earth' you drill through will be liquid presents quite a problem. Destabilisation and earthquakes? No, I don't think so. If you could survive the temperatures and there is really no way you could but nevertheless, you'd meet a huge core of iron around the centre.

The core was a silly movie. You can see it torn to bits on http://science.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=sci-fi.htm&url=http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Answer 3

Depth, friction and heat. You might hit magma, when you reach the core you hit liquid iron.

Drilling complexity increases exponentially with depth. The chances of a broken drill-string becomes a certainty. The first time you cannot retrieve the drill-string, you've lost the hole.

Answer 4

there are many problems with drilling to the earths core.

a. extreme heat from magma and liquid iron.

b. extreme pressure from weight of rock.

c. finding a drill large enough

d. political problems, such as money and resources.

Answer 5

In addition to the above answers, under the crust of the earth lies molten rock. This will melt anything it touches. Under that, I believe, lies a nuclear reaction creating the heat Similar to the sun.
H2O2, (heavy water) is created by nuclear reactions. It is found in the seas. It has a relatively short half life. So it is constantly being produced. In short, don't mess with this can of worms!!

Answer 6

All of the answers provided above - plus the growing weight of the drill and the torsional stresses that will eventually be too much for the long shafts.

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Answer 7

The drill pipe weighs so much it will pull it's self into. The deepest that I know is about 25,000 ft. They could not keep the drill pipe together.

Answer 8

There are no problems. We just need the government to fund a machine made of Unobtainium. Duh.