[Rockhounds] Drillers break into magma chamber

[Pmodreski at aol.com]

Hi again Kreigh,
 
I just read this item you had posted.  I hadn't seen this anywhere  else yet. 
 Very cool!  Back in the late 1970s when I worked at Sandia  Labs in New 
Mexico, the project we were working on was actually like this--to  explore the 
concept of drilling into a large, hot, magma chamber, and extracting  heat from 
it.  This was pretty "far out"--I don't know if it ever could  really work; 
when you encountered magma like this, you'd have to just push it  out of the way 
& keep drilling through it!  We never actually drilled  into anything like 
this, though; but the lab did collaborate with the USGS in  the research drilling 
into the Kilauea Iki lava lake, at that time mostly  solidified but with just 
a little liquid lava still in its center.
 
This paper was given at the AGU meeting in San Francisco; I'll be there  
(well, in Menlo Park), during the meeting this week, but I'm not actually going  
to go to it.
 

bye again,
Pete
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 12/16/2008 7:22:44 P.M. Mountain Standard Time,  
Kreigh at tomaszewski.net writes:

It has  been described as a geologist's dream - a unique opportunity to 
study up  close the volcanic processes that built the Earth's  continents.

Drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have  inadvertently put 
a well right into a magma chamber.

Molten rock  pushed back up the borehole several metres before 
solidifying, making it  perfectly safe to  study.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7780873.stm


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