While everybody is talking about the exploration of space and our solar system, its a little weird to discover that we know nearly nothing about the Earth itself!
Specifically I am talking about the deep sea and the outer core of the Earth. Certainly, to dive deep into the sea or to dig into the ground are not easy tasks either, but compared to the billions of dollars which are invested into space exploration, the investments made to explore the Earth are rather small.
Although this may change. Some days ago, the worlds tallest drill ship just arrived in Shingu, a small harbor somewhere in Japan (a “drill ship” is capable of drilling into the earth core in the deep sea). They accomplished a successful mission to explore the Earth. The ship is able to drill in 2500 m under sea level another 7000 m into the core of the Earth.
There are several reasons why this ship was built: first reason is to examine critical areas on the sea floor which can cause earthquakes, and second reason is to find life in the Earth core, somewhere between 2000 m and 9000 m under sea level, in the ground.
So this ship brought back huge amounts of stone material collected from deep grounds. And they found life within this material which was not expected by the scientists on board of the ship (!), a life form which never saw daylight (by the way, I would call these life forms “aliens”).
A detailed report of this mission will be available on the web in the next months.
I hope that we can expect more expeditions “digging” into the Earth. For me it’s definitely as interesting as space missions!