So, yeah, we’re going to the center of the Earth, and it’s costing a dump truck of money.
$1 Billion (with a “b”) is going into a project to drill 3.7 miles beneath the seafloor, getting into the Earth’s mantle. The mantle is a 1,860 mile-thick layer, so there’s quite a bit we won’t even be seeing after all this.
But what we will be looking into is how the “Earth has evolved over time.”
[We] are interested in the formation and evolution of the ocean crust, and also about the nature of the mole hole — which is this boundary between the crust and the mantle and the mantle itself — [so] we’re drilling into very hard, crystalline rocks — rocks that formed from the crystallization of magma.
I’m sure the people that are running this project won’t be looking like this:
They’re gonna look more like this:
But hey, going into the mantle! Rock!
Question: What does a geologist do? No, seriously. Someone let me know.
