Inconceivable!
I never heard of Angle of Repose before, but now that you mention it, I’ve thought of the phenomenon.
What a great expression! Mine, naturally, is 180 deg. It’s more difficult to calculate when you pour a drunk into a cab, though.
30km in a year - Still no chance.
The most optimistic estimate would be about 9 months of pure drilling time. However this doesn’t take into account the remaining overheads. You will need about 6 months of time to trip the drill in and out of the hole - mostly to replace the worn out drill head. So far this is the easy part. Then you need to line the hole at various depths - which will double the time at a minimum. Three years if nothing goes wrong at all. None of this takes into account the lack of understanding or experience of holes much beyond one third the goal depth. So the idea that nothing will go wrong is pretty much guaranteed to be incorrect. Indeed you can expect almost everything to go wrong in various ways. A good comparison might be geothermal well drilling. This drills into hard hot rock, something much closer to the conditions to be found at serious depth, and significantly different to oil and gas drilling, which are usually drilling in sedimentary rock. The Habanero-2 EGS well ran into all sorts of horrible problems. Some simply new and unexpected. Chemical embritlement of the drill string caused a blowout (superheated steam) that shut the drilling down. Plus they broke a drill string - something that can take months to sort out or even require abandoning of the well. And that well only went 5km down. If it was a completely sorted technology that required no investment in new technology, maybe five years. Starting now, longer still. Infinite money, maybe save year. Long term it may be that some newer drilling technologies will help. Thermal spalling looks interesting. Or chemical drilling. These may help with the issues of drilling at high temperatures. Thermal spalling is inherently high temperature, so it may be a good choice. Also deformable liners that don’t require continual narrowing of the drill diameter. All being researched, and a promising set of ideas that may make deep drilling easier and cheaper. But they are not production ready, and won’t be for years yet.
I don’t know if you are joking, but Stephenson definitely was. We don’t have the technology to do this.
Besides, that ‘hundred thousand tonnes of molten iron’ would face the reverse problem these other schemes have. It would be too cold to remain liquid and would solidify. And it wouldn’t really get all that far. And stuff would just fill in above it.
If it was 10 km, I’d say maybe. If you were lucky beyond belief. And got very lucky with the rock you were drilling with. And had Tim Tebow on your side. And you had virtually unlimited manpower and resources and nothing went wrong.
Drilling to any appreciable depth under the earth is VERY, VERY hard. That’s why getting oil out of the Gulf of Mexico is expensive. And why it involves technologies that aren’t always as reliable as we’d like (cf: Deepwater Horizon).
But that still doesn’t mean much. The first 10km is “easy” (for a given value of). The next 10 km is much, much harder to drill. The difficulties in drilling a well do NOT go up linearly with depth. Drilling 10 wells of 1000 feet is much easier than drilling a single well of 10000 feet or even a single well of 5000 feet.
Huh. Another metaphor. My joke about mine being 180 deg., it occurred to me, surely has been made by every snot-nose student attending geology 101 since the term was first thought of.
Oh, and I was assigned Madame Ovary and Moby’s Dick in high school.