Project Mohole: Drilling through the Earth's crust.

[Jara sang]

I thought this was rather interesting, as I had never heard of it before. A plan to drill through the Earth's crust into the Mohorovicic Discontinuity to retrieve a sample and undoubtedly open that area of the Earth's interior to mining operations. It was devised back in 1957 and guess who was going to get the contract? Brown & Root. Now Halliburton. Pretty strange.

Project Mohole was an attempt to retrieve a sample of material from the earth's mantle by drilling a hole through the earth's crust to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, or Moho. The project was suggested in March 1957 by Walter Munk, NAS member (1956) and member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Earth Science Panel.

http://www.nas.edu/history/mohole/

http://www.rice.edu/fondren/woodson/mss/ms488.html

[Mikimouse]

1. OK, I'll date myself...I remember reading about Project Mohole

in the weekly reader when I was in elementary school. As I recall, it was abandoned because of a lack of funding and after that, interest waned.

[Snap]

5. Yay for Weekly Reader,

All that happy horseshit about the near future, everything's comin up roses! Remember the television telephone? "What if someone calls you and you don't have any clothes on?"

[Wilber_Stool]

2. That was part of IGY.

The International Geophysical Year. I think the Glomar Challenger, built by Howard Hughes to explore the Pacific, was built that year. Actually it was built for the CIA to recover a Russian sub that sunk a few years earlier.

[Jara sang]

4. I had heard of the Glomar Explorer

They did an excellent story about it on NOVA

[El Supremo]

6. Do you remember this book?

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Nothing strange about it...

it was really big news back then, and all of us kids in school heard about it almost as much as the space program. Mining was always a possibility, but back then we were actually doing scientific research for knowledge sake. Something to do with the International Geophysical Year.

Under Eisenhower, a program was started to increase science teaching in the schools, and my school, a Lutheran one, was one of the benficiaries-- getting brand spanking new physics, chemistry, and biology labs all at Federal expense. The program was continued under Kennedy. What started all this was the Soviets sending up a satellite, Sputnik I, before we did, and starting a grand competition between them and us for space bragging points. That's what got us to send a man on the moon-- we "had" to get there before they did to "prove" our system was better.

Things were looking interesting then, and we worried about nuclear war and obesessed over the cold war, but things looked like they were going to be wonderful after all.

Brown & Root was a big exploration company, and nothing odd about them getting the contract back then. It was long before Cheney.