What If You Fell and Couldn't Stop?

Something goes wrong and the ground stops holding you. A hole opens under your feet, it goes all the way through the Earth, and there is nothing in it to slow you down. You fall past a subway train, dinosaur bones, the deepest cave and the deepest mine anyone has found, and the bottom of the deepest hole ever drilled. Then the crust ends, the rock starts to glow, and you fall through diamonds, blue crystals that hold water, an ocean of liquid iron and the white-hot centre of the planet. And you keep going. The readout on the left is how deep you are. The one on the right is how fast you're falling, and the speeds are real for a fall with no air in the way: you pass the speed of sound six kilometres down and reach about 35,700 km/h at the centre. The depths are real too. Subway tunnels are usually a few tens of metres down, the deepest known caves reach about 2.2 kilometres, the deepest gold mine about 4, and the deepest point of the ocean is 10.9 kilometres. The deepest hole ever drilled, the Kola borehole, reached 12.3 kilometres after nineteen years. The crust under the continents is about 35 kilometres thick. Diamonds form 150 to 200 kilometres down, the blue mineral ringwoodite sits between about 520 and 660 kilometres, the liquid iron of the outer core starts at 2,890 kilometres at around 4,000°C, and the solid inner core, 5,150 kilometres down, is about as hot as the surface of the Sun. With the Earth's real density, the whole trip from one side to the other takes about 38 minutes. Some of it is not real. No hole like this could stay open, and the heat would kill you long before the core. The subway, the fossils, the cave, the mine and the borehole are really in different places around the world; here they are stacked in one hole. Below the first few hundred metres it would be completely dark, so everything is lit for the camera, and nobody has seen the deep rock, so its colours are a best guess. Only the deepest part of the blue layer is really ringwoodite. The fall is slowed down near the things you pass and sped up in between; the real fall to the centre takes about 19 minutes. You would only stop for an instant on the far side, and arriving at night assumes you started on the opposite side of the world in the afternoon. With nothing to slow you down, you would fall back and forth through the Earth forever, and be back where you started every 76 minutes. How this video is made: Nothing in this video is AI-generated footage. Every shot is a real 3D scene built in Blender: the city, the shaft, every layer of rock and the core are modelled, lit and animated, then rendered frame by frame, about 14,000 frames per video. Building the scene takes 2–3 hours and rendering takes another 5–6 hours. The depths, speeds and temperatures come from real data about the Earth’s interior. 0:00 You can't stop falling 0:06 The square 0:24 The hole 0:49 The subway 1:06 Fossils 1:25 Look up 1:38 The deepest cave 1:55 Oil 2:06 The gold mine 2:20 Faster than sound 2:35 The deepest hole ever drilled 2:52 Where earthquakes start 3:11 The rock glows 3:25 The crust ends 3:49 Magma and diamonds 4:18 Ringwoodite 4:42 The lower mantle 5:02 An ocean of liquid iron 5:46 The inner core 6:15 The centre of the Earth 6:46 The other side 7:22 Stars 7:39 For one second #whatif #science #earth #core #geology