The $1 Billion Mission to Reach the Earth’s Mantle

Dana Spataru                                                                                                                        2.15.12

Ms. Davies                                                                                                                  C even

Levitt, Tom. “The $1 Billion Mission to Reach the Earth’s Mantle.” CNN Labs. October

2, 2012.

            The article I read was one about a mission that seems near impossible—tunneling to the mantle of the Earth. After having visited the moon and Mars, scientists wanted to work on discovering more of our own planet. This $1 billion mission will take place in one of three places in the Pacific Ocean, where the Earth’s crust is thinner there, only 6km, than it is on land, where it is 60km. They will drill a 30cm wide hole through the sea floor and Earth, an extraordinary engineering feat. The machine they will be using is a Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel called Chikyu. Its first launch was in 2002 and it is capable of carrying 10km of drilling pipes, more than is needed for this mission. Chiyku had already set a record for the deepest hole drilled through the ocean, which was 2.2km deep. Hopefully it can attain the extra 3.8km needed to reach the mantle. The major problem with the drill is that it needs to be replaced every 50-60 hours, so it could take years to reach the mantle unless scientists find a way to solve this issue. Attempts to reach the mantle go back to as early as the 1960s, after Andrija Mohorovicic, a Croatian meteorologist discovered the boundary between the Earth’s crust and mantle. Project Mohole, which drilled a few meters into the crust, was closed down in 1966. Ever since, a project in Russia had taken over the goal of reaching the Earth’s mantle. Neither project got anywhere close to the mantle, but they helped recent projects advance technologically. Due to the massive demand of money for this project, people are skeptical about that necessity of the mission. Scientists believe reaching the mantle would provide a legacy of fundamental knowledge. Since the mantle makes up 68% of the Earth’s mass, they want more information on it beyond what they already speculated about it. The Japanese government is aiding the cost of the mission, and if they start drilling by the end of the decade, we’ll hopefully make it to the mantle by the early 2020s.

            I thought this article was important because this is the only planet we’ve got to live on, and it’s important to know what’s going on beneath the surface. Perhaps learning about the inner layers of the Earth can help us predict how the Earth is going to change and move, so we can better prepare for future earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and other such occurrences. It is also useful to know what our planet is composed of, because then if scientists discover other planets with similar compositions, maybe they can one day be inhabited also.

            The article was generally well-written, but one thing I would change about it is its structure. About halfway through, they start discussing past projects to reach the center of the Earth, jumping back to the 1960s. I feel like this should have opened the article, and continued chronologically into 2012 and leaving at the end that success should be attained by the 2020s. I didn’t like that because it seemed out of order and there wasn’t a smooth transition to talking about past experiments.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/tech/mantle-earth-drill-mission/index.html?iref=allsearch