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.'"

Why hasn't CRUST formed there?

[StarKruzr]

I don't understand how [water (cooling agent) + magma (what the mantle is made of] != crust evaluates to 1.

IGY - International Geophysical Year, 1957-ish...

[Nefarious Wheel]

...and the beginning of the Space Age. There was an attempt to drill past the crust to the mantle in a spot where the transition came up fairly close to the Earth's surface, called Project Mohole http://www.nas.edu/history/mohole/ [nas.edu]. This referred to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, or "Mohole". The IGY was an early attempt at an international cooperative effort in Earth studies.

The importance of this effort was underlined by the fact that Walt Kelly's "Pogo" sent it up. Since the event was a "year" of 18 months, Pogo suggested naming the extra months after foods -- Octoberry, Novemberry etc.

In a side note, the US response to Sputnik included a science payload named Nora-Alice 1, beacon transmitter for Discoverer satellite, which took it's name from a poem Pogo wrote in honour of the IGY. http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/about/history/reminiscence /space.html/ [uiuc.edu] has a picture and a small quote down the column a bit.

So as you can see, drilling a hole in the Earth past the crust to the mantle inspired some of the first orbital satellites. Remarkable! Oh, and then there was LAGEOS, of course, but I'll let you look that one up.