Web site that shows you what's on the other side of the Earth?

[Sunspace]

@Bill Door

Who thinks of a spectacular geyser as a problem? It is an interesting question though. At around 3200 psi and 700 degrees F water becomes supercritical. Supercritical fluids have some properties that would make a 7400 mile high column of it something to think about. The pressure is more than high enough even 2 miles deep to be supercritical, so as soon as the temperature gets up to 700 F, there you go. I wonder what would happen.

I think we’re looking at this backwards. The real question is not whether the oceans would entirely drain into the hole; it’s how wide to make the hole to accommodate all the ocean water.

Okay, Wikipedia says that the volume of the ocean is 1.34 x 10[sup]9[/sup] cubic kilometres. The earth has a mean diameter of 1.2746 x 10[sup]4[/sup] km.

So the hole will be 12,746 km long.

If it’s a cylinder, the cross-sectional area will be:

pi * radius[sup]2[/sup]

or

pi * (diameter/2)[sup]2[/sup]

The volume will be:

length * pi * (diameter/2)[sup]2[/sup]

Rearranging for diameter:

volume = (length * pi * (diameter/2)[sup]2[/sup])

volume / (length * pi) = (diameter/2)[sup]2[/sup]

sqrt (volume / (length * pi)) = (diameter/2)

2 * sqrt (volume / (length * pi)) = diameter

We put in the known length (km) and volume (km[sup]3[/sup]),and we solve for the diameter in kilometres:

diameter = 2 * sqrt (1.34 x 10[sup]9[/sup] / (1.2746 x 10[sup]4[/sup] * 3.14))

diameter = 366 km

Hmm. Wider than I thought.

The elimination of all ocean life should’t stand in the way of a good thought experiment, though. We’d better get digging. Maybe we can save a few bucks if we start digging at the Marianas Trench.

What happens when water becomes supercritical, again?

[GuanoLad]

@Sunspace

Looking at that map, it’s amazing how much land–most of it, it seems–is not opposite other land.

In fact, if South America was tilted 90°, they’d almost fit together like a jigsaw.

[Bill_Door]

@Sunspace

{snip}What happens when water becomes supercritical, again?

It has some really strange properties. Low viscosity, high diffusivity, low density. When the water molecule is compressed enough the bond angle connecting the hydrogen to the oxygen flattens. Once it’s flat, water loses its dipole properties, hydrogen bonding disappears, and it acts like a quasi gas. I think the density will be low enough that you’ll have to make the hole larger. We’ll need a real scientist to tell us what will actually happen.

[Giles]

I like the ideo of digging a hole large enough to contain the oceans. One small problem is where you would put all the material that you dug out of the hole. My suggestion: use it to fill the ocean basins as they empty. The effect of doing such a thing on such trivial matters as plate tectonics, and on the weather (think of the effect of dumping trillions of tons of hot metal on the syrface of the earth), can be disregarded, of course.