Paper supports everything. A business breakfast on a sunny patio on the California coast, too. In this way, between cups of coffee, croissants and toast with jam that come and go, in 1957 a group of scientists from the picturesque American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC) when two of them, the geologist Harry Hess and the oceanographer Walter Munkdecided to launch a research proposal: open a huge hole in the Earth.
And huge is not an exaggeration.
What Hess and Munk proposed was to drill a kilometer well that would allow reaching and extracting a sample of what is known as Mohorovičić discontinuitythe limit between the Earth’s crust and the mantle, a strip located at a depth between 25 and 40 kilometers on the continents and 5 to 10 km if the ocean floor is taken as a reference. What’s more, once they were digging, they could even obtain a sample of the planet’s own mantle.
“It sounded so simple and logical”
The idea sounded delirious, but it was 1957, the space race gained strength and with Cold war As a backdrop, the US looked with interest at any project that would allow it to demonstrate its scientific power to the USSR.
Besides, as Willard Bascom would recognizefrom AMSOC, the proposal seemed most reasonable when listened to with a hot coffee in hand, among colleagues and letting yourself be caressed by the morning sun on the Pacific coast. “The project sounded so simple and logical at a business breakfast on a sunny patio,” I wrote some time later about that peculiar brainstorming.
Whether or not it turned out to be simple—which, spoiler: no, it wasn’t—the idea came to fruition. Its promoters knew how to take advantage of the strong winds of international rivalry and revealed how much the Russians were advancing in the field of science and how they looked with interest at Mohorovičić’s exploration of discontinuity.
57 was the year of the launch of the Sputnik Soviet, so the strategy worked and the drilling project ended up gaining the backing of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a government agency created seven years earlier.
They named the adventure Mohole Projectcombination of “Moho”, the abbreviation of Mohorovičić, and “hole”, hole, in English. Short Simple. Easy to handle and understand. Everything that was not going to be the scientific challenge itself.
“Where do we get the money?” It was not, however, the only question that scientists had to resolve. Another, equally or even more crucial, was “Where to drill?”
The answer was a very specific location in the Pacific, near Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Mexico. And there was a good reason for that. If the efforts were focused on the ocean floor, the team would have to drill significantly fewer meters of the Earth’s crust, a non-negligible advantage when the target is kilometers deep.
The various problems
The problem, of course, is that this requires operating from a boat, in the middle of the ocean, among the waves, and deploying the drilling equipment over more than 3,000 m of depth. “It’s like trying to work on the Earth’s surface from a helicopter, half a mile up,” explains to Vox geologist Donna Blackman.
Today, with the Japanese ship Chikyu opening record wells, an international fleet that includes modern drilling vessels such as the Noble Globetrotter I—the one at the top of this article, built twelve years ago—and researchers reaching marks of 8,023 meters underwater, the challenge may sound less impressive, but in the 1950s it was.
Oil companies had not yet embarked on drilling in such deep waters and undertaking an undertaking like the one proposed by AMSOC required first answering a series of technical questions: How to keep the ship stationary in the middle of the ocean to deploy the drilling equipment? Dropping anchors was not very practical given the enormous distance at which the seabed was located, so the final solution was to use a propeller system.
They had to apply the same ingenuity to solve other equally or more difficult questions: How to deploy the pipeline at such low levels and between strong currents? How to drill with the depth required to reach Moho? And once these challenges are solved, how do we get the samples up to the ship?
With a plan drawn up, in 1961 the scientists set sail aboard the ship CUSS I heading to Guadalupe Island to deploy what was supposed to be the first phase of Project Mohole. The technicians drilled half a dozen wells in total, the deepest of 183 meters and at an underwater depth of 3,600 m. The machinery penetrated 13 m into the basalt of the upper oceanic crust.
That was very, very far from 6,000 meters necessary to reach Moho and the mantle, but it was quite a feat which even led President John F. Kennedy to cable the National Academy of Sciences to celebrate what he considered to be “a remarkable achievement, a historic milestone.”
However, neither Kennedy’s good words, nor the promise of the company, nor the ability he had demonstrated to overcome technical challenges helped the Mohole Project go much further.
In 1961, the Mohole project started, with the aim of drilling through Earth’s crust to the mantle. John Steinbeck (yes, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1yr later) was on the ship & I’ve just found his amazing (genuine joy plus snark) article: https://t.co/CPEB7mCf9q pic.twitter.com/DymGw2ta4o
— Helen Czerski (@helenczerski) December 21, 2021
Drilling holes in the ocean floor was expensive and in 1966 the US Congress decided that it was not interesting to continue paying for it. Add to that bureaucratic errors, the dissolution of AMSOC in 1964 and differences between the members of the team about what the next steps should be and you will have the epitaph of a project that, nevertheless, is remembered as a special chapter in 20th century science and served to demonstrate the interesting possibilities of drilling the ocean floor.
The Mohole Project It didn’t mark the end either. of interest in the Earth’s mantle, an objective on which the Soviets also focused and left other stories just as curious, such as that of the kilometer Kola super deep well12.2 km.
Not simple companies, but so attractive that, as Bascom recognized, it is very difficult to turn your back on them when they are discussed on paper.
Images | Noble Globetrotter I in an image from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement BSEE (Fickr) and Ausdew (Flickr)
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