(6) What if you kept digging downward?

The video addresses the question of what would kill a person digging straight down at a speed of 1 foot per second.

After getting through the Earth's surface layers, temperatures rise steadily as one goes deeper, a trend that continues all the way to the core.

In some areas where hot magma is closer to the surface, the ground gets hotter more quickly.

The Southern Methodist University Geothermal Lab has produced maps showing the temperature of deep rocks in different parts of the United States.

At a depth of 3.5 km, most of the United States has rock temperatures around 100° C.

In northwest Wyoming, specifically the Yellowstone super volcano area, rock temperatures at 3.5 km deep are much hotter than normal.

A digging rate of 1 foot per second is roughly equivalent to 1 kilometer per hour.

If the hypothetical hole is about a meter wide, digging at 1 foot per second would require removing roughly half a metric ton of material every second.

Lifting the rock to the surface after 10 minutes of digging would require over a megawatt of power.

If a hypothetical digger were protected against both the heat from the ground and the digging mechanism, increasing air pressure would become a problem.

Scuba divers, astronauts, and neonatal intensive care units must worry about oxygen toxicity due to their use of either high pressure or oxygen-enriched air.

Randall Munroe believes that if a hypothetical digger is protected against the heat, the digging process, and the pressure, the question 'what would kill you if you kept digging downward?' leaves the realm of physics and becomes fantasy.