Word: drilled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...melt them to irrigate Southern California. But in science the impractical can turn practical overnight with a little cash behind it. In Scientific American this week, Geologist Willard Bascom published the first full report of a onetime AMSOC daydream, which is now backed by the National Science Foundation: to drill a hole right down through the earth's crust to its hidden interior...
Imaginative people have mulled the idea for years. Novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who visualized the earth's shell as a living creature, made his fictional Professor Challenger poke a sharp drill eight miles down, called his story When the World Screamed. AMSOC's goal is to pierce the Mohorovicic discontinuity, which scientists call the Moho for short...
...drilling cannot be done on the continents because they are great rafts of granite "floating" in deeper plastic material. The granite is too thick (20 miles) to drill through. Oceanic islands are also ruled out as drilling sites; their weight has pressed the Moho to an impossible depth. The best place to drill is the floor of the great ocean basins. The floor may be three miles beneath the ocean's surface, but the Moho lies only three or four miles deeper, under a thin skin of sedimentary deposits and a layer of basalt...
...would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But the new search for offshore oil has developed machinery capable of doing it. The rig that appeals to AMSOC is the Cuss I (named for Continental, Union, Shell and Superior companies), a 3,000-ton barge with a 98-ft. drilling derrick mounted amidships. The drill is carried on gimbals, so that heavy seas will not snap the drill pipe...
First step toward the Moho would be to drill a cone-shaped hole in the sea bottom. The hole would be filled with cement poured down the drill stem and a steel platform fixed in the cement. The rock drill would be passed through this steel collar and turned from the barge. The long drill stem would be flexible enough to allow for the ship's motions...