Plan to drill to Earth’s mantle has $1 billion price tag

CNN : The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program is an international collaboration to use a Japanese deep-sea drilling boat to drill a 6-km-deep borehole from the sea floor to Earth’s mantle. The mantle is the 3000-km-thick layer of molten rock that makes up the majority of Earth’s interior and whose convection drives the movement of the continental plates, resulting in earthquakes and volcanic activity. The program has identified three possible drilling sites in the Pacific Ocean where the crust is at its thinnest. The Japanese boat, the Chikyu, would use 10-km-long drill pipes that are 30 cm in diameter to drill into the mantle and allow the geologists to obtain fresh samples. The significance and difficulty of obtaining those samples is comparable to that of obtaining the Apollo Moon mission samples, says Damon Teagle of the University of Southampton, UK, one of the project’s coleaders