Published on March 3, 2017
The drills will need to be lowered through 2km of water before reaching the ocean floor — it is here that the Earth’s crust is at its thinnist (around 6 km). On land, the crust can be up to 60 km thick.
Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet.
This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth’s mantle — a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet — and bring back the first ever fresh samples.
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