Journey to the Center of the Earth: Can We Really Dig to the Other Side ?

© Francesco Ungaro/Pexels

The complete crossing of our planet is a fantasy that has fueled the imagination since Jules Verne's novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in 1864. In this fiction, Professor Lidenbrock, an eccentric scientist specializing in volcanoes, and his nephew Axel, undertake this fabulous journey through the bowels of the Earth.

This dream, however, today comes up against insurmountable physical and technological obstacles, even if some projects have gone very far, even too far in some cases.

The titanic challenges of underground exploration

To understand why such an undertaking is impossible, we must first understand the internal structure of our planet. It is organized into three main layers. The Earth's crust, a thin film comparable to the skin of an apple, constitutes the most superficial part of which the tectonic plates are a part. Beneath it lies the mantle, several thousand kilometers thick, composed of heavy rocks in perpetual motion. At the center, the metal core reaches dizzying temperatures, between 2,500 and 5,200° C.

The most ambitious project to explore the depths of the Earth remains without a doubt the Kola drilling in Russia, which lasted from 1970 to 1989. This technical feat by the USSR allowed to reach a depth of 12.2 km before the teams had to stop: excessive temperatures damaged the equipment, technical failures and astronomical costs. Impressive, but the Earth's core is located more than 2,900 km deep.

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Going further would be simply impossible. Indeed, at such depths, the pressure exerted by the upper layers on the walls of the boreholes increases inexorably with depth, as a diver feels in his ears when going underwater. The deeper you dig, the more the heat also increases. Although the exact data is not always published in detail, it is estimated that the temperature at the bottom of the Kola borehole reached more than 180° C.

Another case also perfectly illustrates this impossibility: that of the Bingham Canyon open-pit mine in Utah. Despite walls carefully calculated to be three times wider than they are deep, a landslide in 2013 caused the collapse of 145 million tons of rock. This copper mine is only 1.2 km deep and 4 km wide.

Drilling would theoretically have the advantage of moving less material than traditional excavation. However, even with current technologies that allow drilling a few centimeters per minute in the hardest rocks, the theoretical complete crossing of the Earth would require several centuries. Not to mention that the weight of the drill rods would quickly become unmanageable and that the movements of the Earth's mantle would end up by deforming and collapsing any well dug.

The extreme temperatures, the colossal pressure and the presence of magma, gas and liquid metals at depth thus definitively make the realization of Verne's dream impossible. This journey must therefore be placed ad vitam æternam in the science fiction category; if there is one thing that cannot be changed, it is the laws of physics, which will forever constitute an inviolable framework that governs our Universe.

• Digging through the Earth is impossible due to the crushing pressure, extreme temperatures and unstable materials at depth.
• The most ambitious drilling projects, such as the Kola one, have only reached 12 km.
• The laws of physics make this fantasy unrealizable, despite scientific and technical advances.

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