Iceland is one of the most boring countries in the world. That’s a compliment, not an insult. The island nation is dotted with thousands of boreholes dug deep into the bedrock to extract geothermal energy. You’ll soon be joined by another team, but it’s never boring. “We are planning to drill into the magma chamber,” says Hjalti Pár Ingolsson from Reykjavík’s Geothermal Research Cluster (GEORG). “This is our first trip to the center of the Earth,” says his colleague Björn Sor Gudmundsson.
Well, not in the center. Some magma chambers (underground reservoirs of molten rock) lie just a few kilometers below the earth’s surface and are within reach of modern excavators. Sometimes magma leaks to the surface and erupts as lava. At the time this story went to press, that’s exactly what was beginning to have spectacular and devastating effects around the town of Grindavik in southern Iceland. The problem is that we usually don’t know where the magma chamber is. “No geophysical method has yet been proven to satisfactorily locate magma chambers,” he says. John Eichelberger At the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
But now Ingolfsson and his colleagues are in luck. They accidentally discover a magma chamber and are planning to do the unthinkable: to intentionally drill into it. This project is nothing short of making scientific history by providing the first direct opportunity to study the hidden liquid rock that Earth used to build its continents. On the way, it could also be…
Source: www.newscientist.com
