World’s first tunnel to a magma chamber might unleash limitless power

ICELAND is among the most boring nations on the planet. That’s meant as a praise, not an insult. The island nation is dotted with 1000’s of boreholes drilled deep into the rock to extract geothermal power. They may quickly be joined by one other, which might be something however boring. “We’re going to drill right into a magma chamber,” says Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson on the Geothermal Analysis Cluster (GEORG) in Reykjavík. “It’s the primary journey to the centre of the Earth,” says his colleague Björn Þór Guðmundsson.

Properly, not fairly the centre. Some magma chambers – underground reservoirs of molten rock – lie just some kilometres under Earth’s floor, placing them inside attain of contemporary drills. They often leak magma to the floor, the place it spews out as lava. That’s precisely what was beginning to occur, to spectacular and devastating impact, across the city of Grindavík in southern Iceland, as this story went to press. The difficulty is, we don’t usually know the place magma chambers lie. “No geophysical method has been proven to satisfactorily find magma reservoirs,” says John Eichelberger on the College of Alaska Fairbanks.

Now, although, Ingólfsson and his colleagues have struck it fortunate. They’ve stumbled throughout a magma chamber and have superior plans to do the unthinkable and intentionally drill into it. The venture will do a minimum of make scientific historical past, offering our first direct alternative to check the hidden liquid rock that Earth makes use of to construct its continents. Alongside the way in which, it might additionally…