Got a Sinking Feeling About Fort Knox

One of the wild ideas that I’ve heard of to explore the earth’s interior, is to use iron. Spread a whole lot of iron for a breadth of many kilometres and piled a certain height. Once a certain height of this solid iron pile is reached, the mass will sink into the earth and might go down all the way to the core of the earth which is mainly iron so it wouldn’t sink any further.

Now I wouldn’t like to execute this idea on the earth because this is bound to create huge earthquakes and volcanic activity on the spot where the exploration was started. Possibly total cataclysmic upheavals may occur, enough possibly to wipe out much life on the surface. Indeed, have we just found the 3197th way to make humanity extinct?

But it’s an interesting idea and there aren’t many alternative ways to get to the centre of the earth, if there are any at all.

I’m certain, if this method will work, it depends on the two variables I’m going to name as well as other concerns. The two variables I know of are density and total mass. Total mass gives us the amount of iron to punch through the crust and density is needed because it just wouldn’t work unless iron is denser than the earth’s crust (which it is).

A smaller total mass is needed if something is denser than iron like say gold. And that greater density leads to the effect being even stronger. So much less gold is needed than iron.

We have in the case of Fort Knox, a situation where gold has been stockpiled like never before. Now I’ve never been to Fort Knox but suspect the compound may be as big as a few square kilometres. If the American keeps adding to the stockpile, it might reach a point where it sinks into the earth and all that gold will end up at the core.

Wouldn’t that be hysterical? Assuming the seismic damage is minor, how would the guards explain what happened? “I can’t explain it more clearly than the ground swallowed the whole base!”

Loyal guards wouldn’t be believed and exploratory missions would find nothing. At least until they started looking for seismic traces. Would they believe scientists who told them the theory that I outlined above?

Many would be jailed – including scientists. The CIA, FBI and military would turn outwards, to other countries in suspicion.

And it would all be due to the simple act of stockpiling too much gold in a large compound.

Indeed, could this not be what happened to El Dorado, the famed lost city of gold?

Perhaps the city rulers kept adding suburbs. And eventually the city was too big and too dense and disappeared below the Earth’s crust.