Sid Perkins reports that early in the spring of 1961, a group of geologists started drilling a hole into the seafloor off the Pacific coast of Baja California. The expedition, the first if its kind, was the initial phase of a project intended to punch through Earth crust and reach the underlying mantle. Little did they know that their efforts would soon be overshadowed when John F. Kennedy launched the race to the moon in May of that year. By the end of 1972, after expending billions of dollars and via the collective effort of thousands of scientists and engineers, six Apollo missions landed on the orbital companion and brought home more than 841 pounds of moon rocks and soil. Meanwhile, the earthbound geologists who hoped for getting a glimpse of Earth inner workings were left empty-handed with the remnants of various programs thanks to budget cuts. Since the 1960s, researchers have attempted to drill into the mantle but have not yet met with success.
Some efforts failed due to technical problems, others have fallen prey to various sorts of bad luck ... including, as discovered after the fact, picking inopportune locations to drill. Nevertheless, those efforts have shown that the technology and expertise to drill to the mantle exists. And now the first phase of the most recent attempt to reach this important part of our planet is boring through a thin section of ocean crust in the southwestern Indian Ocean. When the drillers eventually pierce the mantle, hot molten rock will not surge up the hole and spill onto the seafloor in a volcanic eruption. Although mantle rocks do flow, they do so at a speed akin to the growth rate of a fingernail, says Holly Given, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The inner and outer core solid and liquid masses that are largely made of iron, nickel and other dense elements occupies only 15% of the Earth volume.
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