subsurface oceans, we d like to think that with water and energy sources and chemical nutrients or the chemical ingredients that are necessary for life we ll get microbial life on other planets like that. jon: 128 degrees below zero at times or the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth, yeah, that would be pretty difficult conditions in which to work. i guess part of the problem is the simple matter that it is so cold they get this drill in there, and it freezes up again. i mean, the hole fills up again and freezes. true. and they ve got to keep this drill string or this drill bore open for over two miles of ice, 13,000 feet down to the lake. and then you ve got to penetrate into this pristine lake water without injecting, as was told us, contaminants into that hole. so it s a very carefully-planned effort or more than ten years to make it this far. next season we ll get actual samples out of the bore hole to see if there is bacterial life or something more complex.
from these other valves and ultimately they will shut down the oil from all the valves in this new cap they ve put on. one of the concerns that the government scientists raise, that when they do that, the goal is to build up the pressure and stop it, they re worried some could come out down here, where the seal where the new cap was put on, some pressure could come out there. that s one concern. the bigger concern i was told today by people involved in this is this, that if you cap it here, the pressure comes down, and you ll get down here at the base of the well, this is the old well essentially that down here, right along the seabed floor, there could be problems. and if that happens, they re worried about some sort of catastrophic rupture down here. walk us through the big questions here. well, this thing thank you, john. the thing exploded. 86 days ago. 11 people were killed. and you don t know what sort of shockwaves, what sort of pressure waves went up and down this long dril
and so bear in mind that in the earth s crust there in the seafloor, you have a big pipe casing. then you put in a smaller one. it gets down all the way to seven inches. down very deep, almost two miles down, in the earth s crust. so that whole drill string below the earth s surface may have been rattled. and i had this model rigged up. here s the new cap which has a relief valve on it. this would go to the surface. but you ve got to think of things below the seafloor. if this were the seafloor, this drill string goes down, down, almost two miles. so anywhere along this string, in the earth s crust, what you might think of as solid rock, after you give it a jolt big enough to explode a drilling platform, there could be cracks down there. what you end up with is oil coming out all over the place in the seafloor. now, everybody s hope is when this valve is closed, this valve up here or this series of valves