ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

Scientist Dana Andrews takes a bold new approach to the problem of providing energy for the world — he taps into geothermal energy by drilling into the Earth's molten core.







But when he sets off an atom bomb to break through the tough mantel, it creates a traveling crack in the crust that threatens to split the Earth apart.





Desperate engineering efforts are made to stop the traveling crack. In the climax, part of the Earth breaks off and forms a new moon!





All of this sounds a little better than it actually looks in the film.

The special effects are not overly impressive, and the new moon which forms during the "big climax" is never actually shown, just described in dialogue. Still, the film boasts a fine cast, a literate script, good production values, and competent direction by Andrew Marton.





Ironically, the idea of a tectonic plate cracking open is considered more scientifically sound today than when the film was release.

Also starring Peter Damon, Alexander Knox, Kieron Moore, and Janette Scott.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

This is a great trailer that makes a strong pitch for this unusual movie. Let it put you in the mood —


______________


— and then enjoy the movie!


______________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

[Rick]

This is a pretty good one, I think. Doesn't really matter how sound the science is, the point is that it's presented intelligently, so the audience (or most of us, anyway) can just say "that sounds good" and go along for the ride.

It's also that rare thing — a sci-fi movie without a monster. That alone probably makes it seem smarter than it really is.

Nice to see Kieron Moore and Janette Scott back together again, a couple of years after DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.

To be entirely honest, this movie had a good headstart with me. I saw it at the drive-in in 1967 as a third, very late night feature. The two lead-off movies were GALLERY OF HORRORS and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME. Frankly, after sitting through those, ROBOT MONSTER would probably have looked really good.

It took a couple of later viewings to reassure myself that my affection for CRACK IN THE WORLD wasn't merely gratitude for saving that long evening at the Lakewood Drive-in Theater. And it wasn't. I like this one.
_________________
Man need not kneel before the angels,
Nor lie in death forever,
But for the weakness of his feeble will.

[Bud Brewster]

IMDB only has five trivia items for this movie, but I thought the two below would be fun to share.
________________________________

~ Eugène Lourié had two models of the gantry built. The second was made of balsa wood for the explosion scene. This insured complete destruction of the gantry while avoiding the danger of the set being sprayed by shrapnel.

Note from me: I'll have to watch that scene closely next to see if the balsa wood was convincing.

~ Both Dana Andrews and Janette Scott are mentioned in The Rocky Horror Picture Show song Science Fiction Double Feature, which is a reference-laden homage to b-movies. Dana for Curse of the Demon and Janette for Day of the Triffids.

Ironically, Janette's costar in Triffids is her co-star in this movie, Kieron Moore. Also, during this same year, 1965, Andrews co-starred with Anne Francis in two different movies, and Francis is also mentioned in the song Science-Fiction (for Forbidden Planet).

Note from me:Hey, I've never seen this movie, so when I listening to the song below it was first time I heard it.

It's terrific! His two versions are slightly different. I think the first one is the better of the two.

_____________ Science Fiction/Double Feature


__________


____________ Science Fiction / Double Feature


__________
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[trekriffic]

[Gord Green]

Gravity sucks!
_________________
There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Krel]

What happens if the expelled mass doesn't reach escape velocity? You'll have a very large mass of molten real estate that does a few orbits (at best), then ruins a lot of people's day.

David.

[Pow]

Director Andrew Marton won a special Oscar for directing the stunning chariot race in the 1959 film "Ben~Hur."

Eugene Lourie would reuse the special effects he developed for the lava in this movie for "Krakatoa, East of Java."

I was always impressed with the bunker set for this film.
It looked like the lair for a James Bond villain in an 007 movie.

[ralfy]

Two more copies:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1zwzru

https://archive.org/details/CrkithWrd1965

[scotpens]

The Crack in the World set was extended by using a perfectly blended hanging miniature.

[Pow]

Thank you for these superb photos, Scotpens.

It certainly appears as if the set design from "Crack in the World'' inspired the look for "Moonraker" which was also a stunning looking set.

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

All Sci-Fi's Saturday Live Chat (<— link) tonight is this movie, and I Googled the question, "Could the earth's crust crack and destroy the planet?" and found this article at IFLScience.

The text of the article is below. The article is long, but it's extremely well written.

(Wow, I love the artwork below.)

__ Could An Earthquake Ever Crack Open A Planet?

By Robin Andrews



An interesting question came up in a discussion about earthquakes recently – namely, could one ever be powerful enough to fracture the planet, or even completely break it apart? Well, short answer, no, but this is a surprisingly complex question to answer, but let’s take a look at the science to see how possible this type of apocalypse really is.

First off, let’s just remind ourselves what causes an earthquake and just how ludicrously energetic they are at their worst. There are so many different ways to get earthquakes, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to the most common for now.

You’ve got fault networks like the San Andreas complex, which has formed at the point where the Pacific Plate is moving northwards with respect to the North American Plate. This type of tectonic margin is called a “transform” boundary, and it tends to produce very shallow and damaging earthquakes.

Then you’ve got two plates coming together to collide. On these “convergent” boundaries, one of two things happens: either the denser plate sinks beneath the other one and gets destroyed in the mantle (see: Japan Trench) or they both smash into each other and rise up to form a mountain range (see: Himalayas).

In the case of the former, you get deep-seated earthquakes, and in terms of the latter, they are at middling-to-shallow depths. With some exceptions, these are how earthquakes are generated on Earth, so how powerful can they get?





Here are the top five most powerful earthquakes on record, in ascending order:

5 – Kamchatka, former Soviet Union: 9.0M (November 4, 1952) on a convergent boundary along the Kuril-Kamchatka trench. It created a devastating tsunami, and over 2,300 people perished.

4 – Tohoku region, off the eastern coast of Japan: 9.1M (March 11, 2011) on a convergent boundary along the Japan Trench between the Okhotsk and Pacific Plates. The tsunami was one of the deadliest in human history, killing up to 20,000 people.

3 – Sumatra, Indonesia: 9.2M (December 26, 2004) on a convergent boundary where the Indian Plate slides beneath the Burma Plate. Scary fact: At one point, the rupture was moving 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) per second, which equates to speeds of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) per hour. The resulting tsunami caused up to a quarter of a million deaths.

2 – Prince William Sound, Alaska: 9.2M (March 27, 1964) on a convergent boundary along the Aleutian Trench. Despite a powerful tsunami, just 30 or so people died.

1 – Valdivia, Chile: 9.5M (May 22, 1960) on a convergent boundary between the descending Nazca Plate and the South American Plate. It also produced a colossal, Pacific Ocean-wide tsunami, but “only” 1,000-6,000 people died.

So how powerful are these beasts?

Most of us are familiar with the Richter scale, which measures earthquakes in terms of the amplitude, or length of one wave cycle. The higher the amplitude, the more powerful the quake. This scale, now-defunct, was replaced by another in the 1970s called the Moment Magnitude Scale, whose values align similarly with the original.

It’s a logarithmic scale, meaning that a 2.0M quake is 32 times as energetic as a 1.0M event. Similarly, a 3.0M quake is 1,000 times more powerful than a 1.0M event. Technically, the scaling factor is 31.6, but I'm cheekily rounding up here.

Seismologists can use the seismic waves unleashed by these quakes to work out how many joules of energy they release. For a point of comparison, an apple falling a meter to the ground from a tree involves one single joule of energy.

The Valdivia quake, using the somewhat basic Richter formula, released 4.5 quintillion joules of energy in mere seconds. This was around 23 times more powerful than the most explosive nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba. Make no mistake, these quakes are insanely powerful.




~ A village near Sumatra seen just after the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami back in 2004. US Navy

Some of you may have spotted a pattern here – all of these quakes took place on convergent plate boundaries. They’re what are known as “megathrust” quakes, which describes one fault sliding upwards relative to another on a gargantuan scale. Forget the fabled “Big One” due to rock San Andreas sometime soon – megathrusts are where the planet is at its most destructive.

To say these five quakes were devastating is a massive understatement. The release of so much energy triggered enormous landslides, turned the soil into a fast-flowing fluid, and cities were literally washed away. They were even powerful enough to ever-so-slightly change the length of a day by causing the planet to wobble on its axis.

It’s safe to say, however, that even these megathrust monsters could not literally crack open the crust though, and as far as geologists can tell, it’s never happened in the entire history of the world. But why?

Well, first off, the crust is already cracked open.

The average thickness of the continental crust is about 35 kilometers (22 miles), compared to the oceanic crust thickness of around 9 kilometers (5.6 miles). Fault networks are often shallower than 80 kilometers (50 miles) deep, but they can go as deep as 600 kilometers (375 miles). The crust, the upper mantle beneath it, and the tectonic slabs subducting into it are all cracked in some way.

The majority of the mantle, however, cannot be cracked open. It's solid, sure, but it’s so hot and squashed together that any attempt to split it would be like putting a dent in a highly pressurized tube of toothpaste. Instantly, mantle material would rush in to fill the gap and the shock would be absorbed.

But that’s no fun, is it? Surely we can generate an artificial earthquake and tear the planet apart, you may wonder. Why yes, yes we could. Let’s take a look at the energy that would be required to do so.

Earthquakes create frictional heat, particularly megathrusts. Assuming the crust is generally made of granite, which melts at 1,260°C (2,300°F), we can use the magic of physics to work out how much frictional heat would be required to obliterate the crust during a megaquake: 4.4 x 1023 joules, in fact.

That would require an earthquake far more powerful that the 1960 Valdivia earthquake. A 12.8M earthquake, roughly speaking.

If a supervillain made this happen, then it would cause Earth’s orbit around the Sun to wobble dramatically, perhaps messing up our seasonal cycles forever more. The molten crust would explode into the ocean, causing a gigantic steam blast that would obliterate whatever country it was near at the time.

(Un)fortunately, this type of megathrust quake could never happen in real life. The forces required to generate it are far beyond the mechanical strength of any rock we know of, which means that the stress of two plates would cause them to jut forwards long before they could build up enough energy.

If you really want to crack open a planet, we’d suggest hitting it with an asteroid. The famous dino-killing monster was enough to crack open the crust as far north as Colorado.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)