What would happen if we drilled to the center of the Earth?
That would cause you to fall at terminal velocity, and you'd end up stuck at the center of the Earth, completely weightless and helpless. I'm sure the engineer in you is screaming obscenities at the screen right now. We can barely dig a tunnel just a few kilometers into the reasonable outer crust of the Earth.
In a word, no. The center of the Earth is roughly 3,959 miles (6,371 km) down. The deepest hole that was ever drilled was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, at 7.6 miles (12.26 km) deep. That's 0.19% of the way to the center of the Earth.
It's the thinnest of three main layers, yet humans have never drilled all the way through it. Then, the mantle makes up a whopping 84% of the planet's volume. At the inner core, you'd have to drill through solid iron. This would be especially difficult because there's near-zero gravity at the core.
Then it was the turn of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Drilling was stopped in 1992, when the temperature reached 180C (356F). This was twice what was expected at that depth and drilling deeper was no longer possible.
After five years, the Kola well had reached 7km (about 23,000ft). Work continued until the project was abandoned in 1989 because the drill became stuck in rock at a little over 12km (almost 40,000ft or 8 miles) deep. That is the current record for a depth reached by humans.
Humans have drilled over 12 kilometers (7.67 miles) in the Sakhalin-I. In terms of depth below the surface, the Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 retains the world record at 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989 and still is the deepest artificial point on Earth.
There's no way to explore our planet's interior directly; the deepest hole ever drilled, the Kola Deep borehole in the Russian Arctic, reaches only 0.2 percent the way to the center.
No. The Earth has a lot of mass and moves extremely quickly in its orbit around the Sun; in science speak, we say its 'momentum' is large. To significantly change the Earth's orbit, you would have to impart a very great change to the Earth's momentum.
Microscopic plankton fossils were found six kilometres (3.7 mi) below the surface. Another unexpected discovery was a large quantity of hydrogen gas. The drilling mud that flowed out of the hole was described as "boiling" with hydrogen.
Because Earth is nearly spherical, the gravitational forces from all the surrounding mass counteract one another. In the center, “you have equal pulls from all directions,” says Geza Gyuk, the director of astronomy at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. “You'd be weightless,” free-floating.
Could you dig a hole to China?
Take a closer look at a globe: China is actually not antipodal to the United States. That would be impossible, since they're both in the Northern Hemisphere. If you dug a hole from anywhere in the lower 48 states straight through the center of the Earth, you'd actually come out… in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Is there any chance that drilling deep into the Earth could cause a volcanic eruption? No. Even if engineers were to drill directly into a reservoir of molten magma, a volcanic eruption would be extremely unlikely. For one thing, drill holes are too narrow to transmit the explosive force of a volcanic eruption.
The hole, which was named the “Kola Superdeep Borehole” or the “Kola well” reached 12,262 meters (7.6 miles) deep, making it the deepest hole ever dug. The Kola well is more than 14 times the size of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
Scientists found microscopic fossils of single-celled organisms at 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) down. And at nearly the same depth, they discovered water. They also found that the temperature at the bottom of the hole reached a blistering 356°F (180°C). Being too hot to continue, drilling officially halted in 1994.
So scientists rely on seismic waves—shock waves generated by earthquakes and explosions that travel through Earth and across its surface—to reveal the structure of the interior of the planet. Thousands of earthquakes occur every year, and each one provides a fleeting glimpse of the Earth's interior.
Temperature in the inner core is about 5,200° Celsius (9,392° Fahrenheit). The pressure is nearly 3.6 million atmosphere (atm). The temperature of the inner core is far above the melting point of iron. However, unlike the outer core, the inner core is not liquid or even molten.
While thousands of climbers have successfully scaled Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, only two people have descended to the planet's deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench.
It's a long journey to the centre of the Earth, but getting there isn't just a hard slog for us humans. It's 6,371km (3,959 miles) to the centre of the Earth and the deepest hole ever drilled (the Kola Superdeep Borehole, now welded shut in the image above) was only 12km (7.5 miles) deep.
Life from all three domains (Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya) have been found in the deep subsurface; indeed, the deep subsurface accounts for about 90% of all the biomass in Archaea and Bacteria. The genetic diversity is at least as great as that on the surface.
Save this answer. Show activity on this post. It would be hot underground. Geothermal gradient indicates that on Earth, 1 mile underground would be about 40-45 C (75-80F, just as you said) hotter than on the surface.
What is the center of the Earth called?
Finally, the center of Earth is called the core. It is an extremely dense area composed mainly of metals, where the temperature is above 6,000 degrees Celsius. Part of this heat, carried by the slow movement of molten matter, rises toward the surface and warms Earth's crust.
Earth's solid inner core may be home to a "hidden new world", scientists have claimed. Within the scientific community, there is consensus about Earth's inner core being a solid compressed ball of iron alloy, which is surrounded by the Earth's outer core.
The finding, published in Science, suggests that a reservoir of water is hidden in the Earth's mantle, more than 400 miles below the surface. Try to refrain from imagining expanses of underground seas: all this water, three times the volume of water on the surface, is trapped inside rocks.
The deep-ocean floor is teeming with undiscovered life-forms that help to regulate Earth's climate, a new study finds. Researchers sequenced DNA from deep-sea sediments around the world and found that there is at least three times more life on the seafloor than there is higher up in the ocean.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.