If you have an active imagination, you may have wondered how possible it is to dig a hole right through the earth! Is it really possible?
The answer is No! For the simple reason that if you will have to contend with:
- More than 12,875 kilometres of solid rock and molten magma!
- Temperatures up to 6000 degrees.
- Extreme pressures up to 300 million times more than what we experience on the surface of the Earth.
Also, the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It is slightly flattened at the poles, and bulges a little at the equator due to the Earth’s spin. By the time you have gotten no more than about 48 kilometres down (less than 0.4% of the way through), you will find your tunnel filling will magma, which melts everything.
But, let’s say that somehow it was possible. That a hole, going straight through our planet, did exist. What would the properties of that hole be?
If Possible, What Will the Hole Be Like?
First, falling or jumping straight down the hole is more difficult than it sounds. After about two kilometres of falling, you would crash into the side of the hole and likely never even make it to the other side. But why?
Because of the Coriolis Effect. The surface of the Earth is constantly spinning at more than 1,600 kilometres per hour. If you go deeper into the Earth, it’s still moving all around you. So, if you jumped into the hole, you would soon be travelling faster than the sides of the hole around you, causing you to crash into the sides.
The only way to make it work, would be to dig the hole straight through Earth’s poles. Then the Coriolis Effect wouldn’t apply, but it gets much more interesting.
Without the Coriolis Effect getting in the way, you would fall straight down, being pulled by gravity the same as if you jumped off a building. And, with nothing to stop your rate of speed, you would soon be traveling at about 10 kilometres per second.
But, as you approached the centre of the Earth, something wild would happen. The mass above you would begin to cancel out the attraction of the mass below you, meaning that the downward pull would weaken until you reach the center. And this is where things get crazy.
Once you reach the centre, you would experience NO gravitational pull, becoming weightless. You would just float, being pulled equally by gravity in all directions, and still traveling at a tremendously high speed. As you pass through Earth’s centre, still moving at 10 kilometres per second, the process would begin to reverse. And the pull would strengthen again, until you popped out on the other side of the globe about 40 minutes later.
But for this to happen, you will have had to survive extremely high temperatures, capable of melting anything! Also, you must have positioned someone on the other side to grab you the moment you pop out; otherwise, you will be sucked right back towards the centre of the earth and made to repeat the whole process!
Quick Fact:
The deepest hole is the Kola Superdeep borehole in Russia, and at over 12 kilometres barely manages to scratch the Earth’s surface, not making it past the outermost layer of our planet.
Source: boyslife.org
