Geothermal 2.0: Why Cornell University put a 2-mile hole in the Earth
The Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, is a small city of some 30,000 people, spanning 2,400 acres and hundreds of buildings, including castlelike dorms and state-of-the-art laboratories, an art museum shaped like a sewing machine, and a power plant that produces some 240 megawatts of electricity every year.
This leafy, academic metropolis is perched on layers of sedimentary rock – geology that reveals itself in the gorges that slice through the campus, deep crevices where, long ago, errant waters of retreating glaciers ripped open the earth.
These layers continue deep underground, thousands upon thousands of feet, until they hit what is known as the “crystalline basement.” There, nearly 2 miles down, lies a rock barrier between what we, as humans, typically think of as “earth” on one side, and the planet’s hot, silicate mantle on the other. It also marks the location of what a growing cadre of scientists, entrepreneurs, and government officials sees as a viable solution to a pressing, yet elemental, challenge: how to stay warm.
On the one hand, this might seem like a mundane problem for the intellectual and technical ingenuity of one of the world’s top research universities. Humanoid ancestors, after all, solved this problem of winter centuries ago with their fires and blankets and animal skins. Today, central heating systems have made staying warm almost an afterthought, even in those Northern Hemisphere locations that freeze for months on end.
But there is a looming problem: How we heat mostly relies on burning fossil fuels. This is a problem because of what it means for the world’s climate, which is changing rapidly thanks to atmosphere-warming emissions. But it is also a problem because it is becoming clear that staying warm through winter is tied to global forces often beyond one’s control, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in both gas shortages and cost spikes.
This situation, a growing
