What happens to the water in that ocean? Does it fill up the hole but only to the center of the Earth, or will the pressure of the water push the column all the way to the other side of the planet?
How much of the hole gets filled?
And what device are you going to use to drill this hole? How do you keepit from melting? How do you extend it that long? How do you keep the hole from collapsing on itself as you go? . . .
Assuming that we’re drilling a hole through a planet that is solid and reasonably cool inside, and that the hole emerges in the centre of a land mass at the other side, yes, the water will fill the hole on both sides and the water level on the other side (tidal forces and other niggly phenomena notwithstanding) should rise to the same level (i.e. distance from the centre of mass of the planet) on both sides.
Some interesting things might happen to the water in the middle though, due to the extreme pressures involved.
As a practical matter, conventional deep drilling requires the hole be filled with drilling mud. Said mud acts both as a lubricant and as a physical force able to transport the cuttings to the surface where they can be filtered out and the mud reinjected through the middle of the drill pipe to return via the annulus with additional cuttings. Therefore, you poke through to the ocean and the hole’s already fluid filled with a medium who’s specific gravity is greater than sea water and resists displacement.
You’d piss off some shrimp… that’s about it.
check the archives to see a similar question Cecil answered about jumping through a hole in the earth.
Some interesting things might happen to the water in the middle though, due to the extreme pressures involved.
That’s right; if the pressure goes too high (more than a gigapascal, I understanf) the water would turn to dense ice.
This ice would be heavier than water and stay at the bottom of the water column, unlike low pressure ice which floats.
There may be whole planets up there in the sky with skins of water ice overlaying a mantle of dense ice and rock.
What effect would gravity and water pressure have on the scenario?
For sake of argument, we drill a 3 foot diameter hole and case it in teflon coated aluminum. The entrance being 3822 miles from the center of the Earth and the exit (ocean) being 3819 miles from the center of the Earth.
beajerry, I`ve read that one before. This is different in that the pressure from the ocean would have a much different effect.
I like Mangetout`s answer the best so far.
Why do you think the water will go through the core and come out the other side?
Mangetout didn’t say that the water would emerge from the land mass, he said that the hole should.
The water would settle evenly on either side of the core, ignoring heat and tidal effects.
I think you misunderstood his post. Mangetout?, clarify please.
This is a standard first-year physics problem, at least with a single compact object instead of an ocean full of water…
If a planet has a radius of 6000 km, and you’re on the surface, you are held to the surface with the gravity of the entire mass. If you’re 3000 km inside the planet, the gravity that you feel is due only to the amount of planet inside the 3000 km radius. The stuff outside that radius-- even if it’s most of the planet’s mass-- doesn’t affect you.
So, if you’re at the center of the planet, you don’t feel gravity at all.
If you fell from the surface down to the core, you’d still be falling faster and faster because there’d still be (progressively weaker) gravity pulling you down. Once you got to the core, there’d be no more gravity, but you’ve got so much speed that you keep going through the tube up to the surface on the other side. Because of conservation of energy, you have just enough speed to make it to the height from which you fell. Then you’d start falling again, and go back and forth through the core.
If it were an ocean instead of a person… well, you’d probably have the first bit of the water slowing down as it approached the opposite side of the surface while some other water was going really fast through the core. It would probably spew out the opposite side, and not be able to flow back because of the huge pressure from the water still coming from the first side.
But eventually, there’d be equal amounts of water on both sides, and equal amounts trying to fall down the hole from either side, and crashing together at the core… I think it would settle down and you’d have shallower oceans on the surface, and a water-filled tube through the planet.
I think it would shoot out the other side like a geyser.
Or at least I like to think it would, because that would be a great visual, but I suspect the only pressure on the column comes from the water directly above that column. That is, you don’t really get the whole weight of the ocean pushing down through the hole; you only get the weight of the cylinder of ocean directly above the hole.
In that case, I’d have to say you would win up with a column of water that stops at the earth’s surface on the opposite side of the ocean.
Trunk, that was my thought too. Also, wouldn`t atmospheric pressure on the dry side play a role?
Something that bugged me about this scenerio is that when you jumped into the hole you are still moving at the rotational speed of the crust. This could be as much as 1038 mph, or as little as zero. I guess what I am getting at is the possibility that if you jumped in you would be leaving a smear down one side (the east?) of the tube. Is this right?
What do you mean by this?
The atmospheric pressure on the dry side is the same as the atmo. pressure on the wet side. You might be thinking “but you’re trying to counteract the amto. press. on the dry side with an OCEAN on the wet side.” But you’re not. The atmo. pr. on the SURFACE is equal on both sides. As long as I’m right about the force on the column just coming from the cylinder of Ocean above the “drain”, then once you break the surface, it’s just water pushing on water.
Another thing to consider is that water falling down a hole is different than an object falling down the same hole. The water has surface tension and there would be some sort of vacuum effect occurring in the hole, NO? And the water would have to displace all that air that would have occupied the hole.
I think this would depend on the depth of the ocean and diameter of the hole…this coupled with the zero gravity near the core and the equal atmospheric pressure on the other side, I`m starting to lean towards a hole that would be rapidly filled but just to the surface of the dry side. No gushing water or anything dramatic like that.
Nothing dramatic, no, but I don’t think it would fill very fast. Any reasonably sized hole would be enormously longer than it is wide, leading to substantial frictional losses, even with ultra-smooth walls. Thus, I would imagine that the water would accelerate at first, but would eventually reach a maximum velocity as the frictional forces overcame the gravitational force. Exactly when this happens is not clear to me, since:
- Frictional effects of both the water and the air ahead of it need to be accounted for.
- I suspect that the pressure in the tube may be enough to turn the oxygen and nitrogen in the air to liquid (or even solid!) at some distance from the center of the Earth.
- As mentioned above, the water will solidify with great enough pressure. This causes even more friction.
And this is ignoring any compression waves travelling through the compressed air. In any case, the end result should be a tube completely filled with water from one end to the other (a substantial portion being solid), but I’d think it would take a pretty long time to completely fill.
Why this is because he was drilling from the northenr hemisphere to the southern. I think he will need to put a big plastic net around the otherside so the ocean doesn’t fly off into outerspace like a cosmic drain. 
:o However, a plastic sheet of that volume would slowly turn the world into the movie that never happened Highlander 2. Didn’t that have the big sheet over everything? Then maybe we could have an ocean in the sky. That would rock being able to look up and see the fishies and sky submarines. I want to live there. 
Um, no. When you leap in, you are already moving at the same speed as the hole. Tell me, what happens to you nowadays when you jump into a small hole–for example, you walk downstairs into your basement? Are you turned into a smear running down the wall?
Now, having said that, I’ll point out that you will drift towards one side of the hole as you descend and are traveling faster, rotationally, than the sides of the tube. But, the drift will be slight, relative to the speed you are descending. You could brush the wall (assuming it’s smooth) and, with a slight push, drift back into the center of the tube with only a few nasty rug burns.
I suppose I was thinking of making the trip without air resistance. When you started the trip you would be moving as much as 1038mph sideways and zero mph down. At the other side of the Earth you would be moving 1038mph in the opposite direction, and zero mph down again. This would mean that you would have to change your speed a total of 2076mph; I was thinking that this would hurt mightily. However, with a terminal velocity of about 125mph it would take you 31.7 hours to reach the center. I would expect you to slow as you approached the center as well due both to decreasing gravitational pull and the increasing density of air (assuming 1 atmosphere at the surface). On the way up, the jumper would have somewhat less than 125mph which I doubt would bring him a significant distance. I can see a diver with more than a day in the air would have no problem keeping away from the walls.
On the other hand, if this jump were in a vacuume I would predict several contacts which I am sure would be dangerous at the speeds he would reach. At the very least, spinning until you puked would be an issue.