What would happen if you fell through a hole in the earth?

Published in 1864 by Jules Verne “Journey to the Center of the World” In his story, a group of people encounter an exotic environment after entering a volcano in Iceland and descending near the center of the Earth. As enjoyable as it is to read, there are too many elements that contradict scientific reality.

But what would actually happen, according to science? of our planet radius is 6,371 kilometers, only the crust is 40 kilometers. Although it seems unlikely for now to dig that deep by digging, let’s assume that we can go down using our imagination and see what happens.

After you had just dropped 150 meters (0.002% of the way to the center of the Earth), you would encounter an air pressure that you couldn’t handle.

As if that wasn’t enough, due to hyperoxia (oxygen poisoning) you would die The lower your corpse fell, the more you would be crushed by the intense air pressure.

As you can see, it is impossible to go deep without dying. Well, let’s say you can wear an outfit that can protect you from all kinds of pressure. What happens if you fall into a hole with this pressure suit?

After falling about 1.1 kilometers, you would die of heatstroke as you would experience a temperature of around 50 degrees. As your body continues to fall and reaches a depth of 2.7 kilometers, the temperature will reach about 130 degrees. your bodily fluids would begin to boil.

When your dried bones and remnants of meat reach a depth of about 200 kilometers (3% of the way to the center of the Earth), it encounters a temperature of about 930 degrees Celsius and is completely burned to dust. Your pollinated state would continue on and travel the remaining 6,171 kilometers to the center of the Earth.

As you can see, even if you wear a special suit that protects you from pressure, this time you would be burned to death.

Then let’s increase the protective factors even more; Let our special suit protect you from pressure, heat, toxic gases and radiation. What would happen if you jumped into the hole like this?

Since you will gain speed as you fall due to Earth’s gravity, after about 10 seconds, after falling 500 meters down, about You would reach a top speed of 200 kmph. When you reach this speed, the air resistance you will encounter is high enough to prevent you from accelerating any further.

The deeper you go, the weaker the gravity will be. Both for this reason and because the air pressure will increase more Your speed will gradually decrease.

After about a week of falling, you would finally reach the very center of the Earth.

So this scene in the movie “Journey to the Center of the Earth” is just a fantasy. The reason why the drop took so long – as we emphasized before – is that you can reach a maximum of 200 kilometers and after a short time you can reach this speed. due to an increase in pressure and a decrease in gravity it’s falling more and more.

The gravitational force at the center of the Earth is zero because there is an equal amount of matter in all directions and they all exert an equal gravitational force. Like this scene from the movie “Godzilla vs. Kong”:

Also, the air inside the hole is so dense at this point that It’s like walking around in a soup. Right at this point you have a little momentum, you can use it to get past the center of the Earth and continue through the hole.

But once you cross the center of the Earth, “down” is now in the other direction. Once you had crossed the center with your momentum, you would again fall slowly towards the center. You would end up floating at the center of the Earth.

So what would happen if we blew all the air out of this hole?

Since there would be no air, there would be no air resistance. That’s why you accelerated to incredible speeds as you fell, tens of thousands of kilometers per hour you would see a maximum speed. You would now reach the center of the Earth in just minutes instead of 1 week.

Once you passed the center of the Earth, you would start to slow down because gravity would work in the opposite direction. As you exit the hole at the other end of the Earth, your initial stupendous speed now approaches almost zero. It’s just that you enter one end and exit the other. It would take 41 minutes. But in a scenario like not being able to get out the other end, you would go back and forth like a yo-yo from one end to the other.

There is a good example of this in the 2012 science fiction movie Total Recall. A train entering one end of the world and leaving the other could transport people from Australia to England in just 17 minutes.

This train, which can move so fast by using the power of gravity, Passing through the middle of the world It is subject to the reduction of gravity, and the passengers in it experience this situation. Fortunately, the movie does not go against science by not ignoring this important detail.

So how deep have we dived so far?

The gigantic hole you’re looking at is located on the Kola Peninsula near Russia’s border with Norway. 12,262 meters has reached the bottom. It has the title of “the deepest hole ever drilled vertically from the surface”.

Thanks to a new technology, it is possible to go down to a depth of 20 kilometers.

Quaise, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and energy firm, fusing atoms It is working to descend to this depth by using millimeter-long electromagnetic radiation waves. In this way, almost unlimited and to clean geothermal energy access can be provided.

This 20 kilometer hole is compared to Earth’s 6,371 kilometer radius. there is nothing left we can say. Still, it’s an important step forward for science and technology.