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Comment by sdfghswe | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe they don't show a photo of what appears to be a 10 meter in diameter, 2.7km deep hole.

Ice cores are a few inches across. The photo at the top of the article is not of the drill hole but of the hole they had to dig in the snow to get to the ice they actually drilled.

See the photo of the final ice core [1] to see how miniscule the actual drill hole is.

[1] https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2023/pay-dirt-for-i...

Why is is black and white though? also - how do they transfer energy to drill down 2.7km? or how the hell does it work?

See other comment, and "that's a fun thing to check youtube for", respectively =)

As mentioned in the article, the core was handled under red light to prevent any potential damage. Perhaps the decision to convert the photograph to black and white was made because otherwise it would have been black and red.

The article definitely makes it sound like they had “boots on the ground”. There’s a picture of muddy boots and the caption says they are covered in ancient mud.

That mud came up with the last core.

You need to clear a lot of snow before you can stand on the ice that you're drilling in (You can't drill straight if your rig's sitting on snow, you need to dig until you hit solid ground, and in this case the ground is ice). That's the "boots on the ground" part. They were physically there to do the drilling (as opposed to giant automated core drillers such as DISC[1], which don't require "boots on the ground" so much as they just require one or more operators to oversee operation)

The ancient mud's from hauling up the ice cores, not from standing 3 kilometers deep in a giant hole.

[1] https://icedrill.org/equipment/deep-ice-sheet-coring-drill

I’m not disputing the reality; it would be a bit ridiculous and I assume incredibly dangerous especially given the rate at which the whole thing is moving. I’m just arguing that the article is worded in a way that is encourages such a misunderstanding.

There's a bright future in big holes.

Imagine what we can get our hands on if we could find a nice, cheap way to dig 10+ km down all over the place. The mantle is 2000+km thick. Our deepest mines are 3-4 km deep.

We could also harvest a ton of heat this way - and maybe even use it for garbage disposal. Master Of Orion 2 had the Deep Core Mines and Core Waste Dumps - maybe that's the way to go!

Is the idea of using a big hole for garbage disposal that we would dump the garbage into the molten core and let it burn? Or is it more about using the hole as a really deep landfill?

Do you know what a hole from the surface to the molten core is called?

An active volcano.

Scary thought but you’d (have to) stop digging way above the molten part.

It heats up way above 100C long before you get there, which should be plenty for geothermal energy.

I wonder if sustained high temperature exposure would gradually decompose plastic / toxic waste / other bad things into less harmful components.

Of course, heavy elements came from down there, so it’s probably not an issue to dump them back down. Just stay well clear of the water table!

I am of course not a geologist, and it’d be interesting if one could give a perspective on this.

I'm not sure how tall a column of water you need to trigger supercritical water oxidation, but the problem would be getting the oxygen down there.

Better to do that stuff at the surface, I think.

Yeah, I realized that after I commented, and when I googled it, the Quora answer I got basically boiled down to "you don't know what will come back out."

I always thought that was the scary part of a nuclear plant meltdown until I watch Chernobyl and realized poisoning the aquifer for a million years is a much more likely scenario.

The camera wouldn't take the picture, and then several of the scientists had to be sedated as they started acting strangely.

As long as they don't come up with schematics to build a white Marker...

For all we know that could be psyops by Lovecraft. Maybe it's not a white marker, it's a blue beacon.

It's a bit hidden but there's at least a few cool pictures in the "Facts about the EGRIP camp" section (Click the + icon).

There you can see that the actual hole is ~10cm in diameter and the actual drilling site under the snow.

Its more like 5cm in diameter.

Just for fun:

Volume of ice = π * (radius)^2 * height

where radius = diameter / 2 and height is given in meters.

Volume = π * (10m / 2)^2 * 2700m

Volume ≈ 354,177.66 cubic meters

The density of ice is approximately 917 kilograms per cubic meter.

Weight of ice extracted = Volume * Density of ice

So, the weight of the ice extracted from the hole is approximately 324,856,152.42 kilograms.

Greta must be fuming.

In all seriousness though, ice cores are a few inches in diameter, not 10 meters. Unless they take one of those tunnel boring machines and send it vertically down through earth.

To be fair, is a photo of a hole that interesting?

I mean, there’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to photos of holes.

Please don't do this here.

yes, people love pictures

Here's a picture of a cat sitting on the hole.

Or a video dropping a rock into it

What an ice hole.

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