Posted on 10/19/2024 1:56:00 PM PDT by nickcarraway
I'm in one of the world's volcanic hotspots, northeast Iceland, near the Krafla volcano. A short distance away I can see the rim of the volcano's crater lake, while to the south steam vents and mud pools bubble away.
Krafla has erupted around 30 times in the last 1,000 years, and most recently in the mid-1980s. Bjorn Guðmundsson leads me to a grassy hillside. He is running a team of international scientists who plan to drill into Krafla's magma.
“We’re standing on the spot where we are going to drill,” he says. The Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) intends to advance the understanding of how magma, or molten rock, behaves underground.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Following in the footsteps of Arne Saknussemm and Professor Otto Lidenbrock.
Recalling International Geophysical Year 1957-1958 & Project Mohole (Drill through the crust and sample the Mohorovic discontinuity.) This was a 1960s project that broke up over jealousies,etc.
The days when we did Big Science!
Bang zoom to the moon!
Must have seen a few catastrophe movies that started the same way...
The Blue Lagoon is doomed...
Reykjavik is doomed...
It is a bit like a Tiger. Where does a Tiger sleep? Any damn place it wants to. How does Magma behave? Any damn way it wants to.
Humor now aside, this is good research. Much energy can be harvested from the earths heat so long as it is economical to harvest this energy. Oddly today the cheapest source of energy is natural gas and nuclear. Get government out of the game and supply and demand will give the public the cheapest source of energy as the companies compete against each other.
"Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith explains it all in simplicity.
That's deep...
I hope the drill rig has a really, really good blowout preventer.
Drilling into a volcano…what could go wrong?
Keep in mind that a cinder cone volcano is a really big BOP, and they tend to fail.
I once attempted to inspire some interest in using very deep 325 BHT Springer gas wells as preheat for combined cycle gas turbine plants. No interest. Too scary for all and too costly to case against very high bottom hole pressures. Probably nobody will drill that deep and high pressure again in what is left of my lifetime. Maybe a few are? I don’t check permits anymore.
The image comes to mind of someone shaking a can of soda and then popping the top. Hope they are using robots and no one is downstream.
All at once, unannounced, the drill steel blew a thousand feet into the air
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