Is it possible to drill to center of 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.
Not only has no one ever drilled to the centre of the Earth, no one has ever even managed to drill through the Earth's crust. In fact, we know more about outer space than we do about what's under the Earth's surface! We know that Earth has layers. The Earth is made up of a crust, mantle, and core.
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.
Drilling was stopped in August 1994 at 8,578 metres (28,143 ft) of depth due to lack of funds and the well itself was mothballed.
Scientists estimate it would take about 91 billion years for the core to completely solidify—but the sun will burn out in a fraction of that time (about 5 billion years).
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.
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.
The time it takes to drill through the important half of the inner core would take 1,140 years. Add up all those numbers and you get – drumroll please – a grand total of 10,260 years to drill into the true center of the Earth using conventional drilling technology.
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.
Why can't we go to the core of the Earth?
Realistically, we will never get anywhere near the Earth's core. The levels of heat, pressure and radioactivity (one of the main sources of internal heating) are so high that even if we could bore through over 6,000km of rock and metal, a probe would be unable to survive.
"Our new findings indicate that the core may contain as much as 1,200 parts per million potassium -just over one tenth of one percent," Lee said. "This amount may seem small, and is comparable to the concentration of radioactive potassium naturally present in bananas.
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.
Earth's core is cooling at rates faster than previously thought, which could speed the planet's inevitable march toward uninhabitability millions or billions of years from now, researchers said this week.
The Earth's core does, in fact, cool down over time, and eventually it will solidify completely.
In order to be able to dig down to the center of the Earth, my friends and I would have needed to dig our way through 6,378 km of rock, mantle, and iron. Most of this journey would be through temperatures hot enough to melt rock, getting as high as 7,000 Kelvin at the center.
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.
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.