Infernum

It was a beautiful afternoon; the sun was beating down from high in the sky with fierce intensity. A cool breeze was blowing a welcoming relief across the bow of the 88-foot Northern Rose, a cargo ship making a routine run for the Deep Core drilling expedition. The Northern Rose was en route to the Devil’s Tower, an offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

As the 88-foot vessel made its way further out to sea, one of its crew members called out, “There it is!” and pointed over the bow toward the horizon. Mary, a young team member of the Deep Core scientific expedition, stepped out of the cabin to catch a glimpse of the platform. Being vertically challenged as she was, Mary had to climb up the ladder well to the second level of the wheelhouse to get a good look. As she turned the corner of the stairs, she looked out over the bow and saw the familiar peak of a rusty orange crane tower on the horizon, a very welcoming sight for Mary who has been away for too long. She knew it would be another hour before they reached the offshore drilling platform, but she could not help but get excited for this was a very important delivery. Along with the usual staples of food, medical supplies, and few special requests from the crew, this shipment also included a new diamond bit for the drill that had been digging a twelve-mile-deep hole into the earth’s crust for nearly five years. The diamond bit was an expensive component of the drill that regularly wore out and needed replacing, but this one was special. This bit was the last one they needed to finish drilling through the earth’s crust into the mantle, thus completing phase one of their five-year project.

The drilling platform named Devil’s Tower was now in full view as well as the Deep Core team. Mary was now with the crew of the Northern Rose on the deck preparing for the offload, well out of the way of the captain. A familiar voice came over the radio, it was Mary’s father. “Pull under the east crane, the south crane is down again.”

“Copy that,” replied the captain of the Northern Rose, who was happy about the news, knowing it meant he did not have to take a long way around and fight the currents coming in. Once in place, Mary took charge of the offload, directing the crew to their places and ordering the crane to lower its hook into the cargo bay; it was all hands on deck for the lift, although it was a small load, Mary did not want to chance damaging the diamond bit.

The offload took several hours, a repeated process of lifting crates out of the Northern Rose and onto the platform. Mary greeted the team leader Jon, her father, with a big hug and a smile. “This is it, Dad, the last push we need to get through.”

Jon just looked down at Mary with a little smug grin on his face. “We’ll see, sweetheart, we’ll see. We have to get the bit down the hole first!” Knowing Mary was chomping at the bit to start drilling and that it would take weeks to lower the miles of pipe and the new diamond bit down the hole, Jon just kept grinning.

The next three weeks went by slowly for Mary, who spent her time going over the designs of the Deep Core probe, the reason for this massive undertaking. The core probe was a force meter encased in many layers of tungsten steel and ceramic to withstand the heat and pressure beneath the earth’s crust. The idea was if they could monitor the movement of the tectonic plate they were on, they would be able to predict earthquakes. If successful, Deep Core would eventually have multiple probes on all the tectonic plates to form a global early warning system. However, for now, one probe was a big enough undertaking for the Deep Core team.

Joe, a good friend of Mary, was in the lab with her most days since she got back from her supply run, getting the probe ready for its descent. Joe was standing by the probe double checking some numbers when, for no reason at all, he placed his clipboard down on the desk beside the probe and looked at Mary with a smirk. “Have you ever noticed it looks like a giant tampon?” he asked, referring to the probe.

“You’re sick, Joe,” Mary replied with a smile. She always did enjoy Joe’s sick sense of humor; ever since he joined the project a year ago, he and Mary quickly became good friends. “Well, it does... And another thing,” Joe said.

“What?” Mary replied.

“It was designed to go inside Mother Earth.” Mary began to laugh, bending at her stomach slightly as she began to blush a little from the comment.

“Ya, I suppose it does,” she said, looking over at the probe with its white ceramic shell that did look kind of like a tampon. “Well, I guess the tether would be the string then, huh?” Mary snickered.

They were both laughing at the probe when Jon walked through the door to inform them that the last pipe section was attached and they were ready to begin drilling again. Mary and Joe stopped laughing, looked at each other for a brief moment, and then bolted for the door with eager anticipation like two little kids on Christmas morning.

On the deck of the platform, Joe and Mary watched as the giant pipe began to turn, faster and faster, until it reached the desired 8,000 rpms. The massive water pumps kicked on, forcing seawater down the hole to remove the debris and the massive pipe began to push down into the earth, spewing steam and debris out of the hole. Inching its way down, the pipe descended slowly until all but a few feet of the pipe were visible. It was time to add another section of pipe, a routine that the crew had become very good at over the last five years. The south crane had the next section of pipe at the ready, it was not for the drill but rather a slightly larger pipe called the casing; a large piece of steel that lined the wall of the hole, notched on three sides down the inside of the pipe. When welded to the thousands of casings before it, there was a perfect line of these notches all the way down for the probe to grab on to in case the tether broke. Once welded in place a pile driver began its work; this was Mary’s favorite part, watching the giant piece of equipment that she referred to as the Sledge Hammer pound the casing into the ground one ear-shattering thump at a time. It was quite rhythmic. Thump, thump, thump, as the casing was driven into the ground. Once in place, the crane already had another section of drill pipe at the ready. With a loud ratchet sound and then a sudden bang it was threaded on to the previous pipe and ready to go again.

“The new bit seems to be holding up, Mary,” Joe shouted with a tone of hopefulness in his voice.

“It was only one section, Joe, we’ll have to see if can make it to the end of the run before we can call it,” Mary shouted back, watching the new section of pipe descend further into the earth. Suddenly the pipe stopped spinning, and a loud spooling sound echoed from the rig. “Is it the bit?” Mary shouted. “Did we lose the bite on the bit?” she screamed, fearing that the bit had failed.

“No!” said one of the operators, “It’s the rotor, we lost the grip on the pipe.”

Mary was relieved that it was not the expensive bit that failed but rather something that could be fixed from up top without removing the pipe and setting the expedition back several months more. The machines were shut down, and the platform was quiet now. Mary, Joe and the rest of the team removed their earmuffs and gathered by the drilling rig.

“What happened?” asked an inquisitive Mary.

“The bearings on the rotor gave out, there is nothing holding on to the pipe,” an operator replied.

“What’s going on, Mary?” Jon asked. “Did we lose another bit? Those things are not cheap you know,” he added.

“No, some bearings went out on the rig,” she replied with the same sarcastic tone she’d used since she was a child.

“So we are not drilling right now?” Jon asked with a concerned look.

“No, Dad, we are not drilling. Can’t you tell from the silence and lack of work being done?” Mary snickered sarcastically.

“If we are not drilling anymore, then why is the pipe going down the hole?” Jon asked with a puzzled look on his face as he stared over Mary’s shoulder at the rig. Mary turned around to see the massive pipe slowly descending into the hole. A flurry of crewmembers and drilling operators desperately began working on the rig as fast as they could. Mary ran up to Mr. Johnson, the lead drill operator, and asked,

“What’s going on?”

Mr. Johnson replied calmly, “The pipe is falling into an air pocket, and if we can’t fix the rig and get a hold of that pipe, we are going to lose it.”

The pipe sank into the hole slowly at first then faster and faster until the last twenty feet of pipe just disappeared down the hole, excessively fast for anything to be done.

“What now?” Mary asked. Mr. Johnson put his hand under his chin for a moment.

“We send a camera down on the tether. If we hit a cavern the pipe is probably sitting on the bottom of it by now. We need to know how deep it is so we can retrieve it once the rig is fixed,” Mr. Johnson replied.

“How long before we can continue, Mr. Johnson?” Jon asked.

“These types of air pockets can range from a few feet to a few thousand feet, one can never tell. Once we get the camera attached to the tether and down the hole, we’ll have a better idea of how long we’re looking at,” Mr. Johnson explained.

The next day, he informed Jon and Mary that the rig was repaired and that the camera was set up and ready to go. Mary went down to the cafeteria to get Joe. He was halfway through his breakfast at the time, but Mary didn’t care because there was no way she was going to watch the monitor without him. The camera descended down the hole, all the while Mary kept a close eye on the monitor for any signs of the pipe while Joe read off the depth from the spool.

“That’s five hundred feet, Mary,” Joe said with a concerned voice.

“Well, Mr. Johnson said it could be deep,” said Mary with a cheery demeanor. After three hours of descent, Joe kept reading off the depth of the spool, but it had almost turned into a joke. They were more than three-quarters of the way down with no sign of the pipe. Joe was beginning to nod off when he heard Mary shout,

“Stop! Stop the spool, Joe.”

Joe stopped the camera and looked to the monitor. “What is it, Mary?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but we should definitely record this for my dad to see.” Mary reached over and pressed the record button on the camera’s controller while she stared at the monitor and watched as a tiny pinprick of light in the middle of the screen kept getting bigger and bigger until it came into the camera’s range for a brief second before the monitor’s signal was lost leaving only static behind.

“What was that, Mary?”

“I think it was magma, Joe… Oh my God! Do you know what this means?”

“Mary, you’re right, we did it. We broke through, no wonder there wasn’t any pipe in the hole—it melted.” Joe and Mary’s brief celebration ended after just a few seconds when they both realized that the magma they saw in the monitor was coming up, and coming up fast. Mary ran as fast as she could to her father who was on the far side of the platform.

“Dad, Dad,” Mary shouted as she ran.

“What is it?” Jon replied, seeing the sheer horror in her face.

“We saw magma in the monitor … it’s coming up fast!”

Just then Jon looked over at the rig and saw a light coming from the hole. A dim glow quickly turned into a super bright flash and just as quick, magma spewed from the casing onto the platform. One giant glob of magma solidified into a near-perfect sphere as it came out of the casing. The outer crust began to harden from the cool air before it fell to the lower deck of the platform and then rolled toward the edge as if it were alive. The magma was covered in clumps of charred black lava rock, but you could still see the molten lava flowing inside the giant blob of rock. The mass of melted rock was now sitting on the edge of the platform and was over fifteen feet high. The blob was radiating heat so intense you could feel it from across the platform. Just as the magma began to melt through the steel deck, more magma came out of the casing. The second wave of magma came out of the casing just as fast as the first, rolling into the first with a thud that shook the platform, knocking both globs over the edge and into the sea. After a few minutes, Jon reluctantly went over to the casing, carefully avoiding the half-melted steel that was still glowing hot, and peered down the hole.

“I think that was it, Mary, just some pressure that was released when we punched through. We should be able to get the probe in place. It doesn’t look like anything was damaged too badly.”

With no sign of any more magma in the hole and the casing virtually unscathed from the magma, there was much to celebrate on the Devil’s Tower that night, for tomorrow five years of hard work would pay off as their tectonic probe was lowered into the earth’s mantle.

As Joe and Mary turned to walk away from the rig, Joe turned his head toward Mary.

“Hey Mary.”

“Yes Joe.”

“You know when we were watching the monitor?”

“Ya?”

“Did it look like the magma had an eye to you?”

“You’re silly, Joe.”

Joe paused for a moment then glanced back at the monitor and quietly said to himself, “I know I saw an eye.”