Is it possible to reach the core

If you could drill as far as the core you would have to build a device that's able to withstand that pressure, because if you can't, the material surrounding your well would immediately become liquid and fill the hole, if not shoot up your well towards the surface.

There are no physical walls between the layers of the Earth, only transition zones where temperature and pressure combinations lead to different behaviour of the materials. Similarly, at the boundary between the inner and outer core the pressure is so high that even at those temperatures the iron becomes a solid. Lide, D. Long answer: Our deepest drills failed around 12km down when the drill bits were having to cope with temperatures hot enough to melt the drills. The average distance to the center is over km.

So didn't even get to half of a percent of the way to the center. There is one vaguely plausible method that has been proposed: blow open a crack in the Earth's crust using a hydrogen bomb and then fill the crack with molten iron.

The iron then sinks to the core, and a small probe can sit on top of it and ride it all the way down. There's no way to get it back again, of course, but it could transmit its data back to the surface using seismic waves. We have detectors sensitive enough to pick them up.

Although it's a pretty crazy idea, it was published in Nature magazine by a respected geophysicist, so there's a certain plausibility to it, although I don't think anyone intends to carry the plan out in practice. Original article: Mission to Earth's core — a modest proposal , unfortunately paywalled. Googling the title will give a number of press articles about the idea. Nuclear reactions would be required to create a shaft. High melting point solids under the extreme pressures would be required to reinforce it.

If gamma rays can tunnel, the theory is not implausible but requires an engineering feet to put physics into practice. This should be the focus of exploration besides space exploration. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Then, it would start to get hot. At 4, meters down, you'd pass the deepest mine on the planet, which is cooled with ice to make workers comfortable, because, down here, temperatures are 60 degrees Celsius.

By 8, meters, you'll be as deep as Mt. Everest is tall, but it's still not the deepest point humans have ever dug. That point is at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, at 12, meters below the surface. Down here, there's 4, times more pressure than at sea level, and temperatures push degrees Celsius, so you'd need a lot of insulation to carry on and keep from melting. Near the border, temperatures climb to around 1, degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt many metals, like silver, but not a steel drill.

And good thing because you'll need it to drill through the first part of the mantle, which is made of solid rock, until you reach , meters, that is, when you might need to switch to a propeller. Here, the pressure and temperature are so high that, in some places, rock takes on a caramel-like consistency. In fact, it's this rock that ultimately erupts from volcanoes on the surface. At , meters, keep your eyes peeled for diamonds. They form when heat and pressure restructure the carbon atoms in this region.

Once you reach , meters, the rock is solid again, so it's back to the drill. You see, while it's still plenty hot at this depth to melt rock, the pressure is so extreme that the molecules inside literally can't move into a liquid state.

The drill bit, which churns through hard rock, gets very hot via friction. Drill bit efficacy can be maintained at higher temperatures by using materials with very high melting points, such as tungsten carbide and diamond, but there obviously an upper limit. In the case of the Kola Superdeep Borehole , drilling had to cease when a crust temperature of Celsius F was recorded at a depth of 12, meters 7. It had taken them 19 years — from to — to drill to 12, meters.

Want to really get away from it all? The farthest you can travel from home and still remain on Earth is about 7, miles 12, kilometers straight down, but you'll have to journey the long way round to get there: 12, miles 20, kilometers over land and sea. Why not take a shortcut, straight down? You can get there in about 42 minutes — that's short enough for a long lunch, assuming you can avoid Mole Men, prehistoric reptiles and underworld denizens en route.

Of course, you'd be in for a rough ride. After that, you'd have to traverse a Mars -sized outer core of liquid iron churning as hot as the sun's surface 10, degrees F, or 5, degrees C , then a solid, moon -sized inner core, and, some studies suggest, a liquid innermost core [sources: Angier ; Locke ; NOVA ].

For sake of argument and survival let's pretend Earth is a cold, uniform, inert ball of rock. While we're at it, let's ignore air resistance. At Earth's surface, gravity pulls on us at 32 feet 9. That means that, for each second you fall, you speed up by 32 feet per second — but only near Earth's surface. Gravity is a function of mass, and mass is a property of matter.

On the surface, all of Earth's matter lies below your feet but, as you fall, more and more of it surrounds you, exerting its own gravity. These horizontal tugs counterbalance each other and cancel out, but the increasing proportion of mass above your head exerts a growing counterforce to the proportionately decreasing mass below, so your acceleration slows as you near the core.

At the planet's center, your acceleration due to gravity is zero — Earth's mass surrounds you, gravity cancels out and you are weightless [sources: Locke ; Singh ]. You're still moving at a heck of a clip, though, so don't expect to stop there.