So say I want to dig a REAAAAAALLy big pit. Starting at surface level, and assuming I have access to pretty much any explosive or tool I want. How fast/much can we dig per year?
Lets say I randomly decide I like sahara sand and want a private lake in the middle (and that for whatever reason this particular part is made up of sand rock and soil in random layers). How much could I dig using current technology/knowledge?
Question driven out of pure curiosity. Just random really.
Are nuclear devices allowed?
That is not an answerable question in engineering terms without defining the specific requirements much better. A large but rather shallow hole on uninhabited land is only constrained by the amount of money you have and the amount of heavy machinery you are willing to put into it. Other goals would be much more difficult or not possible at all with today’s technology.
The deepest hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It is quite big but it shows that human techology and logistics can’t go much beyond the 30 - 40,000 feet deep mark without running into serious problems. The Russians gave it all they had over decades and they had to stop because they couldn’t go any deeper. Earth materials start flowing at that depth to cover up any progress made. In other words, forget about that childhood dream about digging to China. You would only get a few miles down before the hole swallowed you.
However, with modern drilling technology, oil and natural gas companies can go down to the 13 - 15,000 foot level in relatively small holes in just a matter of weeks to months once the drilling rig is established. They can even branch off a mile or more horizontally at that depth up to a mile in any direction.
It depends if you want just a really big shallow hole or want a deeper one. You can go big and shallow or deep and small fairly quickly if you really want to and have the money for it but you can’t combine those ideas.
Where I used to live we had “dug-outs” to supply our water. These were pits with steep sides, but sloped ends. The earth was removed and used to build roads alongside the farm land. Every yard had one.
It only took a few days to dig one with an earth moving machine. They were perhaps 3-4 meters deep, and perhaps 25 meters long, 10 wide, though it varied.
TL;DR you could build a mini lake in a few weeks to a few months.
Nukes are allowed IF they’re clean (remember beach front :P). I’m not looking for DEPTH per-Se but how much we can dig. In other words, how much soil/hour (day/week/month) sort of thing.
It’s not really a “real world” question so I understand we’re speculating here but I got curious so I thought I’d ask. Might be someone’s thought of this before.
If you needed to place the concept in real world terms say you wanted to dig a lake in the middle of a relatively flat piece of land (again we can use the sahara, though I honestly don’t really know if it’s flat or not). Assume that while you dig through the sand you hit soil and rock deposits (so it’s a nice “average” mix of substrate).
How big/wide/deep can you make it over time? We’d want the lake to remain so it’d have to be deep enough it wouldn’t just evaporate willy nilly. Disregard limits of temperature/climate in general.
As someone above mentioned, it depends on how much money you have. If you have limted funds, you would be working with 1 machinery. If you had unlimited funds and resources, you can have a big ass lake dug in a week if you wanted to.
The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is 2.75 miles across and around 4000 feet deep. The operation moves 450,000 tons of material per day, or 5.2 tons per second, every second of every day, year after year. I would think that should be sufficient for most of your digging needs?
Stranger - perfect thanks!
JLRog… don’t get it. Flax?
Everybody must google operation plowshare, because we are men and have nukes we just got to set some off somehow…
In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce offered this helpful counsel:
Minor Premise: A man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds.
Minor Premise: Sixty men can do work sixty times as fast as one man.
Major Premise: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
If you had enough money you could deorbit the moon, I bet that would make a big hole
Reported Andy Angels. (The post copies part of the text from another post in this thread.)
The concept of using explosives, nuclear or other, is constrained by how far you can “throw” the dirt. I suppose a series of coordinated off-center blasts could be used to throw the dirt sideways in one direction, but at a certain point it would all fall back in the hole, or you have too much to throw, too high.
Just to point out, there are depressions in the Sahara - northeast of Siwa in Egypt, for example, theres a massive below sea level depression with some marshes in it, and there’s been talk of running a canal from the Nile or the ocean to create a lake there. There’s also (BTW) the Toshka Lakes running northwest from Lake Nasser, and the Egyptian government has had a project to use Nile overflow to flood these depressions and create a second fertile valley parallel to the Nile.
The downside is that all water is marginally salty, and unless it is flushed to the sea the salt will accumulate.
At the risk of being reportd -
You can watch video on the discovery channel about large mining operations; trucks that take huge quantities of dirt, and giant scoops that fill them in a few minutes. How much do you want to spend on this technology?
Alternatively, with a big source of water, you can dredge - fill the hole with water, then pump the mud off the bottom out of the hole using a barge wandering around the hole, and pipes running to a holding area where the removed dirt settles (and you can recover relatively clean water…)
A massive number of planned surface nuclear explosions for the express purpose of throwing dirt up into the air, would probably get your country blacklisted by the entire world. The fallout from even one explosion would be unhealthy.
Yes but you can’t extract material anything like that fast right from the get go. Only once the hole is big enough to have roads down the side to drive big trucks out of…
Since you’re starting on level ground explosives of any kind will mostly throw material straight up in the air or some short distance to the side, so they aren’t going to help much in moving the material. Explosives will be helpful in breaking up solid material so it can be more easily loaded onto trucks and carried away, and conventional explosives will to that in a more practical manner than nuclear explosives.
Now if you wanted to use explosives to breach the Aswan dam, that would be another matter.
Let’s try restating the question so we can get an actual number. What is the average digging speed (cubic feet/meters/etc.) of a single individual in the fastest possible digging team?
Any equipment is available, but operators and all necessary onsite support personnel (maintenance techs, machinists, etc.) have to be counted in the total # of workers.
The Badger 288can did 100,000 cubic yards a day
You want one of these babies: the Bagger 288.
World’s biggest excavator, BAGGER 288 is the largest digging machine in the world. It was built by KRUPP of Germany. The machine is 104 yards high and 235 yards long (almost 2.5 football fields in length). Its weight is 45,500 tons (that’s equivalent to a bumper to bumper line of jeeps 80 miles long) and it took 5 years to design and manufacture at a cost of $100 million. Its maximum digging speed is 10 meters per minute and can move more than 76,000 cubic meters of coal, rock, and earth per day.
Plus it eats bulldozers.
Srsly.