The ultimate underground tunnel

[Wayne Harrison]

If you dug a hole straight down from your house, where would you come out on the other side of the Earth?

Find out:

http://map.pequenopolis.com/

[Jim 23482]

Cool. But I surfaced in the antartic ocean off the southern coast of western Austrialia.glob,glob.

[Ralph E. Powers]

Clicked on or near the vicinity of TAG and ended up in the southern Indian Ocean about four or five hundred miles off coast of Western Aussie... glob glob... guess I won't be digging around here any time soon...

but imagine the force of the water as it comes pouring down ...err UP from the other side when I break through... Whatta ride!

[Sean Ryan]

I clicked Jersey City, and I too am now swimming in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Guess it's safe to fire my gigantic laser straight down.

[hewhocaves]

the word of the day, class is: antipodes...

antipodes...

from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes

i.e. you're very likely to hit water in most parts of the world. thats what happens when the planet's surface is 75% H2O

[GypsumWolf]

Near asheville, NC I ended up in the Indian Ocean.

[fuzzy-hair-man]

I think if you dig anywhere in Australia you'll end up in the Atlantic

[Nico]

you have to dig in south america to reach land on the other side

[NZcaver]

Ha! I hit dry land!

Starting my dig here in the Antipodes, I would end up in Spain - a short drive north of Gibraltar.

This is good. (Actually, I already figured out this trivial fact when I was about 10 years old and was bored one day. But now Google Earth has yet another use, and my findings are confirmed!)

I will start digging tomorrow...

[Evan G]

Again in the Middle of the India Ocean for me to. Well I looks like I on the dividing line of the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

Here is a interesting article:

[center] The Gravity Express
[/center]
Posted by Alan Bellows on October 15th, 2006 at 11:22 pm...Article

About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.

Hooke's calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.

The basic concept behind the gravity train is straightforward: At each end of the tunnel, an observer looking into the hole would see a downhill slope. If a train at one end of the tunnel were to release its brakes, the force of gravity would immediately pull the train downhill and cause the train to accelerate much like a roller coaster. Steeper slopes would result in more speed, with the highest acceleration occurring in the straight-down tunnels which cross the Earth's center. The train would continue to accelerate until reaching the halfway point, at which time its inertia would be at odds with gravity and it would begin to decelerate. As Hooke's data indicates, if the train operated in a frictionless environment it would reach the surface on the opposite end of the tunnel at the exact moment that its speed reached zero. Naturally, a gravity train operating in a real-world environment would need to bring along enough horsepower to make up the friction loss.

.......more

[center] [/center]