if you had unlimited time,manpower,funds and equipment, could divers turn the contients into islands?

Question

would chipping through what attaches the contients to the earth's core turn them into free floating islands?

Answer 1

well....you'd need to make the weight of the landmass your trying to free less than the weight of the enviroment around it for it to be free at all. The continents weigh so much it would be impossible to lighten the weight with any conventional means with todays technology.

it takes a a massive amount of helium balloons to just lift a child off the ground so there wouldnt be enough room for any device to lift or maintain any lift on a continent to float on the water or in the sky making it "free" of landmass connection.

Also since the weight of dirt and iron and rock is much more than water by far then any landmass you chip off the earth would resettle back down faster than you could chip it off.or sink like a ...well...rock.

only in space could something float generally free...but that would defeat the purpose most likely.

Answer 2

Yes, given unlimited time, manpower, funds and equipment you can try to do anything and even get away with most of it.

However, disconnecting the continents from the surface of the earth will only cause them to sink.

What is the tallest mountain on earth? I will give you a hint it IS NOT Everest and it belongs to the US. The answer is Mount Kilauea, the volcano. It is the only mountain connected directly to the sea floor and rising directly to the top. Everest just sits on the continental plate. The problem is that both of them a connected to the sea floor and the earth. If you were to disconnect land then it wouldn't float it would sink.

Now the mythical floating island in Dr. Doolittle was not connected to the sea floor. It had a natural cavern full of helium that kept it floating. However, as proved by the Mythbusters the flotation power of Helium isn't that great. This is because most of our atmosphere is Nitrogen and Oxygen which only have a few more electron and protons than Helium. Now if we lived in an atmosphere of Neon, Argon or Methane then you proposal could turn the continents into floating islands.

Otherwise all islands and continents are still connected to the sea floor and so the earth's crust.

Answer 3

The continents (and the oceans, for that matter) are already floating on top of the mantle. It's liquid most of the way down. Liquid rock, that is.