Boring is drilling a hole, tunnel, or well in the earth.
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Boring is used for a wide variety of applications in geology, agriculture, hydrology, civil engineering, and oil and natural gas industries. Today, most earth drilling is done in order to do one of the following things:
In the 1970's and early 1980's the USSR attempted to drill a hole through the crust, to sample the Mohorovicic Discontinuity. The deepest hole ever drilled failed not because of lack of money or time, but because of the physics of rocks within the crust. The hole achieved approximately 12,000 metres depth, a depth at which rock begins to act more like a plastic solid than a rigid solid. The rock also approached temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius, requiring that the drilling fluid was refrigerated before being sent to the cutting face of the drill. As the drill bits burnt out and were removed for replacement, the hole simply flowed closed, and the rock had to be re-drilled. Due to the temperature, the drill bits burnt out before achieving any headway. The hole was scrapped.
Further attempts at super-deep drillholes are planned by American consortia and further Russian attempts in Finland.
Hot water drill technology is used to melt holes in ice or snow for both Arctic and Antarctic research purposes. It is also lightweight when drilling deep holes, compared to traditional drilling equipment. Hot water drilling have been used successfully in the IceCube Neutrino Detector and Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array projects to drill as deep as 2,450 meters.
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