Pride and euphoria swept through Switzerland last week when a gargantuan drilling machine emerged through the rocks deep under the Alps to join the two ends of the world’s longest railroad tunnel. The 35-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel is an extraordinary engineering achievement: over 12 years, 2,600 workers battled dust, noise and heat beneath up to 1.5 miles of mountain to remove 23 million tons of rock — the equivalent of moving five Grand Pyramids of Cheops
Tag Archives: drilling
Five Years On, Java Still Grapples with Mud Volcano
On the moon-like surface of the muddy crust that now covers a dozen Indonesian villages, any sign of life is welcome.
A New Clean Economy — With Old Sources of Energy
Since his election, President Barack Obama has emphasized the importance of developing new sources of energy and cultivating the jobs that will come with them. “I am convinced that whoever builds a clean energy economy, whoever is at the forefront of that, is going to own the 21st-century global economy,” Obama told a bipartisan meeting of governors at the White House on Wednesday
Is Windows Nokia’s Lifeline?
Nokia’s Stephen Elop certainly has a way with words. In February, in what might have been the most brutally honest corporate memo in decades, the recently installed CEO compared his company to an oil worker trapped on a burning drilling rig, facing a terrible choice