It's funny that of all movies you ask about "The Core". It's known as the scientifically worst movie of all time.

But let's answer your question properly anyway: To drill down to the Earth's core, the guys from the movie built a kind of "sub-earth ship" from a metal that can withstand extreme pressures and protect everyone inside from the intense heat of the Earth's innards. The problem is that such a material is not known to exist, that's why they even call it "unobtainium" in the movie - it can't be obtained.
People need air, so we'd need to build something that encloses air at not much more than 2 atmospheres of pressure, because else you'll die from diver's paralysis, and it needs to stay in shape even with an excess of 250000 atmospheres on its outside.
Okay, let's assume we could build such a vehicle. The Earth is, for the most part, solid (due to the aforementioned pressure, rock doesn't melt even when it gets extremely hot), so we'll need to drill our way through. In the movie they use lasers for that - when you put enough heat in, you'll be able to melt rock even when it's pressurized. The amount of energy required would however be hard to produce in a mobile contraption, plus I'm not even sure if lasers powerful enough have been built. Using a mechanical drill would not work. The heat would destroy it (it becomes dull and gets stuck), this is why all scientific deep drilling projects have failed at 7 to 12,2 kilometers deep. The center of the Earth is more than 6000km down.

What's more: down there you won't even find anything especially rare! The core is made from iron and nickel. The mantle is made from olivine. Olivine is indeed rarely found above ground (usually only when volcanoes barf up some mantle pieces), but due to a relatively rare geological process called the formation of an ophiolite there are actually some huge deposits of olivine that we can just easily dig up, for example in Oman.
On the other hand, there might be diamonds. But we still have no idea how exactly they form and where to look for them. They do come from somewhere down there in the mantle. In the movie they showed huge diamonds the size of city blocks. While they aren't technically impossible (there are even entire stars theorized to be made up of diamond!), I can't imagine how that much carbon (which is what diamonds are) should get into one place at the same time.

If you have any more questions, let me know.

I found an estimation for the total volume of water frozen as ice on Earth excluding sea ice: about 12,7*10¹⁵m³ (equating to 12,7 million gigatons, calculated from these findings).

Yes, movement is caused by this. At the end of the last ice age Scandinavia was buried under several thousand meters of ice. The weight caused the Earth's crust to sink deeper into the mantle that behaves plastically on geological timescales. After the ice melted, the land started "popping up" like a swimming mattress on water when you get off it. Because of the huge masses involved, that "popping up" process takes a very long time, in fact Scandinavia is still rising today at a rate of about one centimeter per year. Like the two sides of a scale, the coast of northern Germany is sinking at the same time, but only at about one centimeter per decade. You can see nice pictures explaining the process at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postglaziale_Landhebung (German, the pics are missing from the English page).

Earthquakes? I don't think so. This might be the case if fault lines subduction zones would experience a pressure release due to melting ice, but as far as I know there are no such zones near any large ice caps. In theory, yes, of course - when large amounts of mass move, stress on the crust changes, and in unlucky cases that might destabilise fault lines, causing them to move (that would be the cause of an earthquake). But I'd say that's very unlikely. The masses of glaciers in geologically active mountain ranges are too small to really make a difference (the Earth has a high inertia), and those glaciers and ice caps that are large enough to cause movement (see above) are all in geologically inactive areas (Antarctica and Greenland, mostly).


I searched for scientific publications, but couldn't find anything. I would also say that these masses are too small to cause any significant movement. They do change the isotopic composition of atmosphere and oceans, though, but that's only interesting because you can measure it, it doesn't have any impact on life, even less on tectonics. Until now, about 300 gigatons of carbon (from all fossil sources combined) have been burned and about 5000 gigatons are thought to exist in total (source). Compare to the amount of ice mentioned above, and you'll see that this mass can be disregarded when talking about tectonic balances.
Of course local mishaps can happen, when you extract fluids from the pores of a rock. Tiny earthquakes associated with oil and gas exploration are known to happen, and collapsing coal mines can also destroy buildings above ground.

wow, that sounds cool, but... how far into the past would we actually be able to see?  I think it would depend on the material as well as the distance away from Earth, correct (light travel)?

First of all thank you for your reply.

I googled a bit and looks like we had to have an enormous lens (about half the size of earth) to see it, but the maths were done to many many light years away.

Doing this on the moon we could see aprox 2s in the past, two moons away 4s and so on

Maybe nasa could launch a gigantic mirror into space, this could help solving some street crimes since you have a "past whole world camera".

Regarding bitip.io, thank you for your feedback but dont call it a scam since im behind it .

Tipped you anyway.
2f3450ff2767ad116eb6860b84ca6c2d45c8831c90b12ad4966885d447dfb531