Issue 10.11 | Nov 2002
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Drilling Into The Core
THE SCIENCE BEHIND HOLLYWOOD'S NEXT INTRAPLANETARY ADVENTURE
The burning question among geophysicists and filmmakers these days is, What’s at the center of Earth? The topic made a recent cover of Discover and sparked plans for three movies, the first of which hits theaters November 1. The Core, Paramount’s science fiction adventure, tracks terranauts who plan to drill to the planet’s center and detonate an atomic bomb. The nukes, they hope, will reheat Earth’s cooling core to maintain its rotation and prevent catastrophic climate change. This idea is actually not too far-fetched a temperature change happens roughly every 200,000 years, and some would argue we’re overdue. To get the science just right the filmmakers “brainstormed with geologists, geomagnetists, engineers, and designers,” says director Jon Amiel. Here’s how close to reality Hollywood got.
Truth is, we have no idea what’s actually at Earth’s center we’ve only penetrated about 7.5 miles of the planet’s 3,982-mile depth. What we do know comes from reading seismic waves that act as a kind of sonar. Old wisdom suggests, as does the film, that the core is a ball of crystalline iron and nickel. New theory: It’s a uranium-filled nuclear reactor.
Giant Geodes The movie’s terranauts crash into gigantic geodes some 10 miles in diameter floating in a molten environment. Geodes do exist, though the largest ones found so far are less than 1 mile around.
All sci-fi stories rely on a couple of gimmes. Here, it’s the notion that we possess a material strong enough to withstand the pressure and the 9,000°F heat at Earth’s center. The filmmaker’s mythical substance is called unobtanium, but similar matter is out there. The Buckyball, or C60, carbon molecule has astounding durability and strength.
A cross between a rocket, a sub, and an earthworm, the craft seems oh-so-Tinseltown. Yet it’s outfitted with high-frequency pulse lasers and resonance ultrasonics that mimic those in the real world. The lasers melt the rock and the ultrasonics pulverize it into fine, white-hot sand. Huge propellers draw the sand in and blow it out, giving the ship propulsion and steering.
- Jennifer Hillner