Get in, loser! We're going diggin'!
Source: nvodka@Reddit
I've decided to dig a hole from one side of the Earth to the other. I've got a shovel ready and everything. Thing is, though, I'm kind of a narcissist and I want an audience for this expedition. I can't start in Kansas City, because although it's a top 50 media market, I'll apparently come out on the other end on the floor of the Indian Ocean, and that sounds like no fun at all. What are the two points that are exact opposites on Earth's surface that are both inhabited and offer me the largest combined audience?
Short answer: Shanghai ↔ Buenos Aires is your best bet.
Longer, shovel-ready explanation:
Why antipodes are tricky
Most land on Earth is antipodal to ocean, not land. That’s why Kansas City dumps you into the Indian Ocean and ruins your press conference. Finding two inhabited antipodal points is already rare; finding two with large audiences is rarer still.
The clear winner
Shanghai, China is very close to the antipode of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
There are slight geographic offsets (Shanghai’s exact antipode is just offshore from Argentina, and Buenos Aires’ antipode is just offshore from China), but these two cities are the largest population centers that are mutually antipodal within a few tens of kilometers. Close enough that a glory hog with a press permit can make it work.
Bring translators. And maybe a structural engineer.
Nope! No ocean; I am terrified of jellyfish. Gotta be exact antipodes!
The hard constraint you just imposed
Exact antipodes + inhabited on both ends
That wipes out almost every major city pair on Earth.
When you apply that filter, the list collapses to small towns, not global media markets.
The clean, textbook example (the one geography nerds agree on)
Alaejos, Spain ↔ Weber, New Zealand
Alaejos
Province of Valladolid, Spain
Population: ~1,300
Weber
North Island, New Zealand
Population: ~450
These two points are as close to mathematically exact antipodes as inhabited places get. This pair is commonly cited in geography texts precisely because it survives strict coordinate checking.
Combined audience: about 1,700 people, plus livestock.
If purity is non-negotiable, accept that your audience fits in a school gym.
And yes — your jellyfish fear is statistically justified.
*sigh* Fine, guess I'll do this for the rubes. Maybe bring a webcam for social media cred.
Got a problem though. Seems I can only get so deep before the walls of my one-meter diameter hole starts to crumble in on itself. I'm starting in Alejos; how deep can I expect to get without structural support before the walls come tumbling in?
Short, unglorious answer: on the order of 1–2 meters. If you’re lucky, maybe 3 meters. After that, gravity wins and your webcam becomes a rescue documentary.
Why your hole betrays you almost immediately
You’re digging a vertical, 1-meter-diameter shaft in unconsolidated ground with no support. The limiting factor is not pressure from the sides (like in a tunnel), but shear failure of the soil forming the wall.
Most near-surface soils (including what you’ll find around Alaejos / Castilla y León) are some mix of:
clay
silt
sand
weathered rock fragments
They hold together only because of cohesion and a bit of internal friction.
Once the weight of the soil column above exceeds that cohesion, the wall fails and sloughs inward.
Your antipode audience will have to settle for:
“Man disappears into hole, reappears never.”
Webcam optional.
*sigh* Fine. I'll go buy some hole lining at the supermarket.
I'm a mile down now. I started on an average spring day on the surface. Am I warmer or colder than when I started?
Warmer. Much warmer.
At one mile down (~1.6 km), you’re well past any surface weather effects and firmly into geothermal territory.
The controlling factor: the geothermal gradient
On average, Earth’s temperature increases by about:
25–30 °C per kilometer of depth
(≈ 45–55 °F per mile)
Do the math
Depth: 1.6 km
Expected temperature increase:
~40–50 °C (≈ 70–90 °F) above surface temperature
So if you started on a pleasant spring day in Alaejos—say 15 °C (59 °F) at the surface—you’re now at roughly:
55–65 °C (130–150 °F)
That’s:
hotter than a sauna
hot enough to make metal tools unpleasant
hot enough that “webcam content” shifts genres
Bottom line
At one mile depth, you are dramatically warmer than when you started—hot enough that:
sweat does not evaporate well
fatigue accelerates
and continuing downward becomes less about digging and more about heat management
The jellyfish are still gone, though, so… small victories.
Yeah, that's a lot warmer! Is this radiant heat from the Earth's core or something else?
It’s not radiant heat from the core. It’s conductive heat from the surrounding rock, supplied by radioactive decay and leftover planetary heat, moving upward very slowly. You’re basically inside a warm brick, not being toasted by a distant furnace.
Most of the heat you feel at 1 mile depth comes from radioactive decay of:
uranium-238
thorium-232
potassium-40
These isotopes are spread throughout the crust and upper mantle. Each decay releases a tiny amount of heat; add it up over continental-scale rock volumes and you get a steady heat flux upward.
This is why continental crust is warmer at depth than young oceanic crust, and why your Spanish hole is toastier than you’d like.
There’s still leftover heat from:
planetary accretion
core formation
early differentiation
This matters more deeper down, but it contributes to the background gradient everywhere.
How the heat reaches you
Conduction, not radiation
Rock is a lousy conductor, which is why the gradient exists at all
The heat creeps upward at centimeters per year, not dramatically
You are warm because the rock around you is warm, and it’s touching you on all sides.
At one mile down, what you’re feeling matches real mining experience.
Humans have gone deeper — but only with:
industrial-scale ventilation
refrigeration
strict work controls
With a shovel, a webcam, and supermarket hole lining?
You don’t reach the center of the Earth.
You reach heat stroke.
Which, granted, still draws views — just not repeat ones.
Wait...URANIUM? To hell with my viewer count! I don't know but I've been told Uranium ore's worth more than gold! I am now officially in the mining industry! All of the backfill is going straight into that ACME Patent Uranium Sifter I found in the supermarket aisle next to the hole lining! How deep do I have to get before I've got 1 kg of sweet, sweet uranium?
Bad news for your sudden career pivot.
Let’s do this cleanly and quantitatively, no ACME optimism.
How much uranium is in “normal” Earth?
Average continental crust uranium concentration:
~2–3 parts per million (ppm) by mass
I’ll be generous and use 3 ppm
That means:
3 mg of uranium per kilogram of rock
Rock density (typical crustal rock):
~2,700 kg/m³
≈ 8 grams of uranium per cubic meter
So you need to excavate ~125 cubic meters of average crustal rock.
You need to dig ~160 meters (~525 feet) deep
to statistically accumulate 1 kg of uranium
assuming perfectly average rock and zero losses
And that’s:
total uranium, not purified
mixed through tons of rubble
invisible to your sifter
chemically bound in minerals you cannot separate without… chemistry, permits, and men with badges
Why uranium is “worth more than gold” (and why that’s misleading)
Yes, refined nuclear-grade uranium is valuable.
But:
Natural rock uranium is extremely dilute
Gold averages ~1–5 grams per ton in ore — and that’s already considered marginal
Uranium mining only works where geology concentrates it to 0.1–20%, i.e. 1,000–200,000 ppm, not 3 ppm
Those deposits are rare, mapped, regulated, and emphatically not under Alaejos
Your ACME Uranium Sifter is, sadly, a rock sorter.
Bottom line
Depth is irrelevant for uranium wealth.
Volume is everything.
Without a rare ore body, uranium is just background seasoning in the crust.
You’ve accidentally demonstrated why geologists get paid and prospectors go broke.
Still no jellyfish, though.
So much for my plans to nuke New Zealand on the other end. Damnit. I'm suing ACME. Maybe that coyote will join me and we'll make it a class action.
All right. Going deeper now. Pretty hot, so I've got my shirt off. My buddies on the surface are telling me about something called a "mahorovicic discontinuity" or something but their voices are getting pretty faint and I can't even figure out how to spell it. When am I gonna run across this thing and what will conditions be like when I do?
You’re hearing about the Mohorovičić discontinuity — universally shortened to the Moho — and it is not the kind of thing you “run into” with a shovel, shirt or no shirt.
Let’s get the basics straight, then kill the romance.
What the Moho actually is (and is not)
Is:
A seismic boundary where earthquake waves abruptly speed up
The transition between crust and upper mantle
A change in rock composition and properties
Is not:
A crack
A cavern
A layer you can see
A line you can scrape with a pickaxe
If you dug through it (you can’t), you would not notice a sharp visual boundary. Instruments notice it. Humans would be dead long before they did.
How deep under Alaejos?
You’re on continental crust (central Spain), so Moho depth: ~30–35 km
What conditions are like near the Moho
This is where the webcam audience drops off sharply.
Temperature
By ~30–35 km depth:
~500–800 °C (900–1,500 °F), depending on local heat flow
That is:
hotter than any furnace you’ve stood near
well above survivability
hot enough that steel loses strength
Pressure
Lithostatic pressure:
~1 GPa (≈ 10,000 atmospheres)
That’s equivalent to:
stacking ~30 km of rock on your chest
pressure levels where rocks deform plastically
State of the rock
Despite the heat:
The mantle is solid, not molten
But it behaves ductilely over time
No voids; any hole instantly closes like warm wax
You wouldn’t be standing.
You wouldn’t be digging.
You wouldn’t be there.
Has anyone ever reached it?
No — not even close.
Deepest hole ever drilled: Kola Superdeep Borehole
12.3 km deep
Still ⅓ of the way to the continental Moho
Temperatures there (~180 °C) already defeated drilling tech
If the voices are fading now, that’s good.
By the time the Moho becomes relevant, the concept of voices has already exited the chat.
Also: keep the shirt off if you like — it will not matter.
That doesn't sound like much fun at all. One might even say it’s…BORING.
What were those folks at Kola looking for down here?
They weren’t thrill-seeking. They were trying to answer embarrassingly basic questions about the Earth—the kind geology textbooks used to hand-wave away because nobody had ever actually checked.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole (USSR, 1970–1992) was not about reaching the mantle. It was about ground-truthing geology.
Kola was about answering questions like:
Are our seismic interpretations actually right?
How deep does water go?
How hot is the deep crust, really?
Is the crust layered—or just pretending to be?
And the answers were uncomfortable enough that:
geology textbooks changed
drilling technology hit hard limits
and everyone learned that the Earth is weirder, wetter, and hotter than expected
Predictions said:
~100–120 °C at target depth
Reality:
~180 °C at 12.3 km
That extra heat:
Ruined drill bits
Softened rock unexpectedly
Caused equipment failure
Ultimately ended the project
Which is exactly why nobody’s tried to beat Kola since.
Not boring.
Just hostile to humans and bad for funding proposals.
No, not "boring" like that; "boring" in the sense that I'm, like, boring into...you know what, never mind.
Anyway, those guys were commies. If they found something cool they wouldn't have told us about it. Maybe there's pirate treasure! I'm gonna keep digging. Not to worry; I've got a portable electric fan with me now. And my buddies on the surface keep pitching extra shovels down the hole to replace the ones that keep melting.
I'm a REALLY fast digger. I can go one meter deeper per second! Plus all the backfill winds up on the surface because magic. How long until I reach the earth's core, and what's it like down there?
All right, let’s accept the magic backfill, the fan of destiny, and your 1 m/s shovel arm and do this cleanly.
How long until the Earth’s core?
Distance to the center of the Earth (from the surface):
Earth’s radius ≈ 6,371 km
That’s 6,371,000 meters
Your digging speed:
1 meter per second (heroic, Olympian, OSHA-be-damned)
Time required:
6,371,000 seconds
Convert to human time:
≈ 1,770 hours
≈ 73.7 days
Just under 10½ weeks
So if you start on a Monday and never sleep, eat, or liquefy:
You reach the center in about two and a half months.
Bring snacks. They will sublimate.
Inner core (5,150–6,371 km)
Solid iron, not because it’s cold, but because pressure is obscene
Temperature: ~5,400–6,000 °C
(roughly the surface of the Sun)Pressure: ~360 GPa
Density: ~13 g/cm³
Shovels are now conceptual objects
Your hole cannot exist. At all. Even magically, the idea of a hole is rejected by physics.
You arrive at the exact center, triumphantly, for about 0.000 seconds
What is the core “like”?
Visually?
Nothing. No caverns. No glow. No magma lake.
Physically?
No empty space
Atoms are packed brutally close
Matter behaves in ways we only model, not observe
Any object is crushed into phase transitions, then irrelevance
It’s not hell.
It’s industrial-grade indifference.
Important misconception to kill
The core is not:
A hollow
A molten ball you can swim in
A place where gravity pulls “down” in one direction
At the exact center:
Gravity cancels out to zero
You are equally pulled in all directions
Which is academic, because you cannot exist long enough to enjoy the sensation
You won’t find:
Pirate treasure ❌
Soviet secrets ❌
A core chamber ❌
You will find:
A place humans know exists
Have never visited
And never will
But hey — for a brief, incandescent moment, you will be exactly antipodal to yourself, which feels like the right ending for this project.
Hey! Cool! I'm floating!
My buds up on the surface are starting to complain. They've been piling up the backfill into a hill. It's roughly conical, what with the dirt being piled on the top and sifting down from there. I'm at the earth's core in my one-meter diameter hole looking for doubloons. How tall is Backfill Hill on the surface?
Right. Let’s inventory the damage.
Step 1: How much stuff did you excavate?
You dug a 1-meter diameter hole straight to the center of the Earth. Total excavated volume:
About 5 million cubic meters of backfill.
That’s the entire hill.
Step 2: What shape is Backfill Hill?
You said:
dumped from the top
sifts down naturally
roughly conical
Loose dirt forms a cone at its angle of repose, typically ~30°.
That fixes the geometry.
Final answer
Backfill Hill is about:
240 meters tall
~790 feet
roughly the height of a 70–80 story skyscraper
With a base radius of:
~140 meters
spreading over several city blocks
Bonus perspective
You:
removed enough material to build a visible landmark
accidentally created Spain’s newest mountain
are floating weightless at Earth’s center while your friends argue with zoning authorities
No doubloons.
No Moho souvenirs.
But you did invent a hill out of nowhere, which honestly puts you ahead of ACME’s legal department.
Enjoy the zero-g.
Hold on, there's a dude down here! He's saying his name is "Professor Lidenbrock". What's this guy's story?
That’s Professor Otto Lidenbrock, and you’ve wandered straight into 19th‑century science fiction.
He’s the central character in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which you’ve been unintentionally reenacting with better math and worse safety standards.
Here’s his deal.
Who Lidenbrock is
German mineralogist, professor in Hamburg
Brilliant, obsessive, impatient, and socially abrasive
Speaks in lectures, not conversations
The original “STEM guy with zero chill”
He discovers a runic manuscript claiming a path to the Earth’s center and immediately decides:
“Obviously this is true, and we are going.”
No peer review. No ethics board. No fan.
What he thinks is down there
In Verne’s world (very important caveat):
Vast hollow spaces inside the Earth
Underground seas
Gigantic crystals
Prehistoric life (mastodons, ichthyosaurs)
Human-sized mushrooms (because of course)
Basically: a Victorian science museum exploded underground.
Lidenbrock expects discovery, glory, and confirmation that he is right about everything.
What actually happens
They descend via an Icelandic volcano (Snæfellsjökull)
They do not reach the core
They wander through enormous caverns that do not exist
They survive on courage, coincidence, and authorial mercy
They are ejected back to the surface through Stromboli, like a geological spit-take
The Earth does not care about their theories.
Why he matters (beyond the joke)
Lidenbrock represents:
The Victorian faith in science
The belief that nature is knowable if you’re stubborn enough
The era before thermodynamics, plate tectonics, and “this will kill you” were fully appreciated
Verne wasn’t writing geology.
He was writing optimism with diagrams.
Why you’re “meeting” him
You:
Dug a straight shaft to the core
Ignored heat, pressure, and realism
Expected wonders instead of phase diagrams
That’s exactly the mindset Verne was playing with.
The difference is:
Verne didn’t know about the Moho
We do
And that knowledge is why modern geology is less fun and more honest
Bottom line
Professor Lidenbrock is:
A fictional scientist
A monument to 19th‑century scientific optimism
The patron saint of “this seemed reasonable at the time”
If he’s actually standing next to you at Earth’s center, then congratulations:
You didn’t just beat physics.
You crossed into literature.
Which, frankly, is the only way anyone ever gets that far down.
Man, what a buzzkill you're being. All right, this guy seems like he's on the spectrum anyway. Screw him, screw his bold Victorian optimism, screw his faithful manservant Standish. Also: screw New Zealand. The old Zealand was better. Plus, they stole Lew Zealand’s name, and as our Muppet adventure taught us, you do NOT fuck with Lew Zealand.
Back to the surface. No pirate treasure, no salable uranium, no head of Josef Stalin being kept alive inside a jar. Gotta be SOME financial upside in this whole experience. What's the most economically productive use I can make of an eighty-story tall pile of dirt and rubble located in rural Spain? Is the climate right for skiing?
Ah, now we’re talking economic pragmatism instead of zero-g heroics or imaginary professors. Let’s audit your 240‑meter “Backfill Hill” and see if it can actually pay rent.
Step 1: Understand the asset
You have:
Height: ~240 m (~790 ft)
Base radius: ~140 m
Volume: ~5 million m³ of earth/rock
Location: rural Castilla y León, Spain
Composition: standard crustal dirt & rock
Think human-scale mountain in farmland.
Step 2: Can you ski there?
Spanish skiing conditions need:
Reliable snow
Slopes with manageable gradient (~10–30°)
Your cone:
Slope: ~30° (angle of repose of dirt)
Height: ~240 m — comparable to modest ski resorts in low mountains
Climate check:
Castilla y León: continental Mediterranean
Winter temperatures: -5 to 5 °C
Snowfall: occasional, unreliable
Not alpine-scale snowpack
Verdict: ❌ Natural skiing is basically impossible without artificial snow machines. Even if you build them, water supply in that area is limited and energy costs would dwarf returns.
Step 3: Alternative economic uses
1. Quarry or aggregate source
Crush the hill into gravel, sand, or fill for construction
Rural Spain has infrastructure projects; local demand is real
Problem: transporting 5 million m³ is expensive, but you’ve already magically removed it—surface material is accessible
Upside: tens of millions of euros if processed and sold over time
2. Tourism / attraction
Adventure tourism: “Man dug to the center, made a mountain”
Activities:
Zip-lines, climbing walls, ropes courses
Observatory-style viewpoints
“Extreme geology selfie spots”
Requires marketing, accessibility, and safety barriers
Moderate revenue: local attraction, maybe regional fame
3. Renewable energy
Wind turbines: 240 m hill in flat farmland gives height advantage
Solar farms: material can be leveled to make platforms, or around the base
Upside: long-term passive revenue, though initial investment is high
4. Agriculture
Terracing: probably not cost-effective
Dirt likely poor quality; slopes too steep for mechanized farming
5. Landfill / storage
Could use hill for industrial storage or controlled landfill
Less glamorous, but potentially profitable
Step 4: Reality check
The highest-value, realistic uses are:
Quarry / construction aggregate – guaranteed revenue
Renewables (wind/solar) – long-term passive cash
Tourism gimmick – limited, speculative revenue
Ski resort? Only with artificial snow and imagination, not climate. You’re a little too far south and dry for that.
Bottom line
Congratulations: your mile-deep hole has literally created an asset. Not pirate treasure, not uranium, not Stalin’s head, but a human-scale mountain ripe for quarrying, renewable energy, or bizarre rural tourism.
If you want to monetize without shovels, I’d start talking to construction companies and solar developers first. Skiing is… a vanity project.
If you want, I can do a back-of-the-envelope “annual revenue estimate” for your Backfill Hill for quarrying vs. wind vs. tourism, so you know which actually makes cash. Do you want me to do that?
Oh, yes, certainly. I'm gonna rely on the same LLM that hallucinated entire scenes from Dungeon Crawler Carl and which tried to convince me that "beer ketchup" was a thing to provide reliable revenue estimates.
I'm contacting an accountant. One who's made of meat. You gotta be realistic about these things.
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