The Russians punched the Kola Superdeep Borehole over 12km into the Earth’s crust. Any deeper and high temperatures would have stopped them.
The Americans tried making gas storage underground with nuclear devices for peaceful purposes.
Could the two approaches (one scientific, the other batshit) be combined to allow for deeper boring? Would there be any way to send nuke after nuke down into the crust, to make a chain of little bubbles in the crust all the way down?
I’m not a geophysicist, but I think it’s likely a nuclear explosion at the bottom of a shaft has a good shot at collapsing the shaft above it. I suppose you could drill a bit past the previous bubble, but it doesn’t seem like a viable approach to me.
Nuclear bombs are not disintegrators; you’d still have to remove rubble/molten rock/whatever from the bottom of the shaft.
Maybe I’m just not understanding your suggestion, though.
related question, do we know even theoretically how it would be possible to make a device to completely disintegrate matter into energy instantaneously and how much energy it might require to do that?
Coremelt, you’d need to produce anti-matter, as far as I know. When matter meets it’s antimatter counterpart, all that’s left is pure energy.
Anti-matter is also the most expensive substance on the planet, estimated to be worth 1,750 trillion US Dollars (USD) per ounce. To destroy one ounce of matter, you’d need one ounce of “identically opposite” antimatter.
Good luck with that!
There may be other ways to convert significant amounts of mass into pure energy using fission/fusion, but I am not very knowledgeable there.
We do. It’s called antimatter. As of 2006, it was running about $25 billion per gram. The project has had some funding problems as is, so I don’t think they’ll be using antimatter. The US’s equivalent project, Project Mohole, was abandoned due to lack of funding as well, so it seems this is a field where getting money is a problem.
You’d still have rubble, molten rock, and what have you in the shaft if you put an antimatter bomb in the borehole. The problem with converting matter to energy is, the energy has to go somewhere, and it’s very hard to make sure none of it escapes as heat.
You mean like an antimatter bomb?
A tiny bit of the mass would escape out through the borehole as gas, so… there’s that at least. But yeah, the amount of material removed would be pretty tiny.
I think they just need to develop new heat-resistant materials to work in it.
There’s also a small problem that there are no facilities for producing antimatter near the Kola borehole. Antimatter is a bitch to store or transport, because it annihilates with any container you try to put it in. The world record for storing antimatter, as of 2011, was about 17 minutes. I suspect creating an antimatter trap that can be transported is an even harder problem, since it puts constraints on the power consumption and weight. The people who stored antimatter for 17 minutes had the power resources of CERN at their disposal, which you couldn’t fit into a truck or container ship.
Another small problem is the production rate of antimatter. As of 2009, it would take Fermilab 100 million years to produce 1/4 gram of antimatter.
Geophysicist here.
Is the idea for safe storage of gas? Or mining purposes? Or what?
In any case, the posters above nailed a lot of the problems with using large explosives to get deeper into the earth. Explosions will still create rubble that needs to be removed and reduce the structural integrity of your boreholes. That, and as noted above, traditional explosions - even fission - don’t really disintegrate the matter.
Also, if you expect to store anything down there, anything liquid or gaseous will eventually leak along the thousands of fractures you’ve just generated from the explosion. As for mining, ditto. Hydrocarbons will escape along all those fractures you’ve just generated. One of the ideas behind hydrocarbon extraction is to take advantage of particular existing fractures that trap hydrocarbons between a permeable layer of rock (that holds the oil/gas) and an impermeable layer that prevents it from escaping. Creating a new set of fractures defeats the purpose.
That said, there is frakking, which is a sort of controlled generation of fractures. A nuclear explosion would also not generate the kinds of controlled fractures you’d want in frakking, either.
Wikipedia says they discovered large quantities of hydrogen gas, with mud “boiling” with hydrogen coming out of the hole. Large quantities of hydrogen gas plus explosives doesn’t seem like such a good combination to me.
The purpose of the borehole was scientific research. If you wanted to study the rocks along the sides of the borehole, it seems that nuking them into glass, either with a nuclear weapon or with antimatter, wouldn’t be so helpful. If you wanted somewhere underground to store something, why not use a shallower hole? It would be cheaper and easier, and you might even be able to locate the hole near the source of whatever it is you want to store.
Your qualifications as an actual scientist and logical manner make you useless to my project.
Gas storage? Mining? Nothing so mundane. I intend to travel… to the centre of the Earth!
I should add to the list of links that inspired me Project Orion. I envisaged a machine that worked in reverse of that, taking itself deeper by clearing space ahead of itself with nuclear blasts. A wonderful idea that you have all now spoiled, thanks 
I had genuinely wondered if a nuclear blast might create a pocket underground, pushing earth aside with blast pressure. The immense heat would then seal the sides and secure it against collapse. Place another device at the bottom of this pocket and blast and extend the hole down again.
Never mind a truck or a container ship—even if you built a CERN-like antimater laboratory right on top of the borehole, 17 minutes probably won’t be enough time to get antimatter to the bottom in a controlled manner.
Try finding some info on Project Rusilon. This was one of the three atomic fracking experiments the US conducted and in this particular shot they did something similar to what you are envisioning. They drilled a hole and then set up three bombs at (IIRC) about 100 foot intervals with the hopes that it would make a continuous “chimney” that could fill up with gas. It ended up not working-- three nuclear bombs several times as powerful as the ones dropped on Japan couldn’t even excavate 300 feet of rock.
Part of the issue is that lot of the excavating power of nuclear explosives is based on the heat of the explosion melting the surrounding rock, but the melting temperature of rock increases with depth. So this scheme would be much less effective at great depths. Rusilon was only about 4,500 feet, so trying it at Kola depths would be much, much less effective.
Besides antimatter, there’s the method of using a decaying micro black hole. The smaller a black hole is, the faster it decays via Hawking radiation; so in theory you could let it decay until it was radiating its own mass away at a high rate, and then start feeding it mass as fast as it decays. The result would be in effect a matter-to-energy converter; matter goes into the hole, and is promptly radiated out against as radiation.
Note that using either this or antimatter to convert large amounts of rock into energy means that you won’t have much of an inhabitable planet left afterward.
Reminds me of a somewhat related idea I heard of some years ago.
Now we’re talking! So how do we get started?
Advance. A lot. If such things are possible in reality and not just theory, they require much better technology than we have now.
I like the idea of dropping a black hole into the earth. What could possibly go wrong?
You couldn’t even just drop it down there. I doubt something that could power an antimatter containment device would fit into the borehole. The deepest borehole is about 9 inches in diameter. And once you take the antimatter out of its containment device, it’s going to annihilate with the matter around it, wherever it is.
I doubt a nuclear weapon would fit into a hole that size, either.
You’d have some trouble going to the center of the earth in a hole that size, too.
Soberingly nuclear devices exist that will comfortably fit. It is utterly amazing just how small even high yield weapons are. A W80 150kT weapon is only 30cm (12 inches) in diameter, and there are smaller, low yield devices - with the the 1kT W33 being only 20cm (8 inches) in diameter. When the lunacy about nuking the Mancondo well was being discussed, one thing that wasn’t a problem was finding a nuke that would fit down the well. (Although the necessary pressure casing to allow it to survive down hole before detonating would add a bit.)