Ocean Floor Crust Wound to Be Explored

eldavojohn writes "A group of scientists are disembarking right now to study an open gash in the ocean floor where earth's mantle lays exposed without any crust covering it. The scientists describe this as the result of the mantle moving too quickly for the crust to keep up. Either that, or the mantle was never covered by the crust and just has always been like this. From the article, 'Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.'"

Mid atlantic ridge?

[ruiner13]

Hasn't the mid-atlantic ridge always been there? How is this a "rare opportunity"? I don't think it will be going anywhere anytime soon.

Second-hand mandatory joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Re:Mid atlantic ridge?

[Stormx2]

The wording is pretty terrible:

'Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.'

Barely get past the crust? So they do get past the crust? Then how is exploring this bit of mantle different from exploring the parts we've drilled to?

Re:Why hasn't CRUST formed there?

[Bellum Aeternus]

You're right magma + coolant (water) = rock. The mantle is a section of the planet, comprised of different materials than the crust. This an opportunity to look at those materials without having to drill do far. Trust me, not many scientists was to be looking at 2000 degree molten rock up close.

There's a lot of other cool things we can see while we're down there, like how the rock crystals formed under that kind of pressure and how fast they cooled. All kinds of cool things can be interpreted by the rocks crystalline structure.

Not just technical limits

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If you read Robert Ballard's autobiography, or one of many other books on oceanography, you'll find that plate tectonics only started to become accepted as a credible theory in the 1960s, with many significant researchers still dismissing the theory in the early 1970s.

To put that in context: people had visited the moon before plate tectonics was widely accepted.

Since then there has been research, including drilling, but it is probably fair to say they mankind still only has a pretty fuzzy picture of what is going on. The limit is not just technical, but also political and funding limits etc. It is easy to get a big ego boost/career advancement from, or funding for some flashy work in space etc, but difficult to do so for digging a hole in the ground.