How To Dig A Hole To The Other Side Of The World (1980)

How to dig a hole to the other side of the world. Find a soft place. [Music] Take a shovel and start to dig a hole. The dirt you dig up is called lom. Lom or top soil is made up of tiny bits of rock mixed with many other things such as plants and worms that died and rotted long ago. When you have dug through the top soil, you'll come to clay or gravel or sand. The digging will be harder. When the hole is 5 or 6 ft deep, you'd better ask a friend to help. She can pull up the clay or gravel in a bucket while you stay at the bottom of the hole and keep digging. Sooner or later, you'll come to rocks. All sorts of rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, granite, limestone, sandstone. If you started your hole in Africa, you might find diamonds. In Brazil, you might find emeralds. In other places, you might find coal or gold or silver. Wherever you dig, watch for old bones and shells. The bones of many animals. Dinosaurs, giant tigers, turtles, and other creatures of long ago are buried everywhere. If you find some, dust them off carefully and save them. When you have dug about 50 ft down, maybe more or maybe less, you will come to solid rock. This is the rocky skin of the earth called the crust. It's mostly granite. To dig through it, you will need a drilling machine. [Music] Start drilling. You may hit water. Rain sinks through the top soil and gathers in pools and underground rivers. If you come to water, you should put on a diving suit. You may come to a lake of black gooey oil. If you hit oil, it would be best to give up this hole and start another somewhere else. Keep drilling. When you have drilled down a mile or so, the rock will be warm. This is because heat flows up into the rock from the center of the earth. You may hit boiling water or steam. This is because rainwater drips down through cracks onto very hot rock. Sometimes it comes up again. In some places on Earth, hot water bubbles up in springs or shoots up in geysers. Because of the boiling water and steam, you will need an asbestous diving suit. Stay out of the way of geysers. If you got caught in a geyser, it might carry you up to the surface and shoot you into the air. When you came down, you would have to start digging all over again. Keep drilling for 10 or 20 miles. You will come to a kind of rock called basalt. Basalt is black and hard and smooth and heavy. There is a layer of basalt 2 or 3 mi thick wrapped around the earth. Keep drilling. As you go deeper, the bay salt will get hotter and hotter. It will get so hot that it will melt and glow dark red. Melted bay salt is called magma. This is the stuff that sometimes shoots out of cracks in the earth and makes volcanoes. When it cools on top of the ground, it is called lava. Volcanoes are very dangerous. Be careful and don't get caught in one. To go through red hot magma, you will need a jetpropelled submarine. It must have a super cooling system, a fireproof skin, and a drill at the tip of its nose. Your nose spaceship must be very strong. An ordinary one would be squashed by the weight of the magma around it or burned up by the heat. down here below the crust of the earth. It is hotter than any fire you ever felt. And it will get hotter and hotter the deeper you go. When you've gone down about 150 mi, you're in what is called the mantle of the earth. The mantle is made of bay salt that is melted into goo. and at the same time is harder than steel. It is melted by the great heat and is hard because of the great weight above pressing it down. Keep drilling. You still have a long way to go. The mantle is 1,700 m thick. As you go down, down, down in your fireproof submarine, you will notice that the color of the mantle turns from red to orange to yellow. This is because it's getting hotter and hotter. At the bottom of the mantle, the temperature is more than 3,000° C. It is so hot that if your ship caught fire, it wouldn't even leave an ash. At the bottom of the battle, you are more than halfway to the center of the earth. Now you must go through what is called the outer core of the earth. It is a mixture of melted rock and iron. It is 1,300 mi thick. It will be hard going, but if you have come this far, you should keep on. You are getting very close to the center of the Earth. After the outer core comes the inner core. The inner core of the Earth is a ball of solid iron. It is so hot that it glows with white light. Go 860 mi straight down and you will be at the center of the earth. [Music] [Applause] [Music] The center of the earth is a place where east meets west, north meets south, and up meets down. At the center of the earth, there is nothing under you. Every direction is up. Your feet are pointing up and your head is pointing up both at the same time. Because there is nothing under you, you will weigh nothing. You will float inside your nose spaceship. The weight of the whole world will press down on your ship. Do not stay long. Go straight ahead and begin the long trip up. Go 860 mi through the inner core and 1,300 m through the outer core. Drill up and up through the mantle and then through the magma and then through the crust and then through rocks and sand and clay. At last, you will come to the surface. You will be about 8,000 mi from where you started to dig on the opposite side of the world. If you started in the United States, you will come up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. It will be delightfully cool, but full of sharks. Stay in your submarine and steer it to the top. There you can open the hatch. You will see the sky and the sun. Or perhaps it will be night and you will see the moon and the stars. If you have a sail, hoist it and start sailing home. or else paddle. When you get home, you can tell everyone you have dug the deepest hole in the world and are very, very glad to be back on top of the earth. [Music] Oh, you found me. [Music]