Ever wondered why humans haven’t journeyed to the centre of the Earth before? Well it isn’t for lack of trying.

The deepest man has ever gotten in its journey to dig through our planet is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Murmansk, Russia which reached its maximum depth of 12.2 kilometres (40,230 ft) deep in 1989.

The project was another extension of the ongoing race between America and the former USSR to prove their might as the world’s dominant superpower, which they decided could be measured in spaceflight, nuclear warfare and hole digging.

Turns out it’s a lot more complicated than grabbing your shovel, or an industrial drill if you just happen to have one lying around, and digging.

Take a moment to recall your primary school science lessons and you’ll remember that our planet is made up of a variety of layers starting at the crust (which is the layer we live on) and going down into the mantle, outer core and finally the inner core.

To add some further context to the depth of the Earth, the Kola Borehole didn’t even make it through the crust, with YouTuber science communicator Cleo Abram revealing in a recent explainer video that this hole was just 0.2 percent of the way to the centre. Which means we’ve still got a very long way to go.

An interpretation of what inside the Earth looks like (Getty Stock Images)

Temperature is a major reason why digging to the centre of the Earth is harder than just drilling, with National Geographic stating that the inner core is around 5,200°C. In order to successfully get a drill through this screaming ball of hell scientists would also need to create a piece of technology which could withstand this heat.

Pressure is another factor making digging a hole to the centre of our planet difficult, with any tool used needing to be able to withstand the weight of ‘6.6 sextillion tons of rock’ pressing inward (via HowStuffWorks).

In Abram’s video she explains what would happen hypothetically if you were able to create a tool which would allow you to reach the centre.

Drill through all 6,371 kilometres of the Earth’s crust and you hit the mantle, which has a gooey consistency due to the combination of high temperatures and pressure.

Make it through all 2,900 kilometres of the mantle and you’ll hit the outer core, with Abram calls a ‘liquid soup of metals’ which reaches 4,400°C. The liquid outer core is also responsible for creating electric currents which, according to Abram, create a magnetic field around the Earth which protects us from deadly cosmic radiation.

Once you hit the inner core things become solid once again, with extremely high amounts of pressure meaning that iron atoms at the centre are simply unable to turn into a liquid.

Create a drill which can withstand all of the above and congratulations, you’ve made it to a place where no man has ever been before.

Of course you do, it’s a great movie and every detail ought to be etched into your mind.

Anyhow, he kind of plops onto the surface of the lava for a couple of seconds before sinking in and that’s the end of him.

But what would happen to you or I if we took a little tumble into some lava?

The short version is that we would die and it would not be pleasant.

The long version is that the rising heat from the lava would make your skin blister even before you made contact with it, clothing and hair would likely ignite before you even hit the surface.

As for what would then happen to your body when it made impact with lava, volcanologist Adam Kent once told Digg that you would float.

Gollum might have plopped in there and sunk down, but lava is dense enough that sinking down would be difficult.

Once you were bobbing up and down on the world’s most painful river, Kent said that as your body was destroyed it would then explode.

“The basic idea is that the gases in a body would expand rapidly and probably cause a series of minor explosions,” he explained as the gas contained within all of our bodies would expand due to the heat and go boom.

Whatever else remains of you is going to be subjected to such high temperatures that before long there’s not going to be much of anything left of you.

You wouldn’t actually sink, you’d just kind of bob on the surface and explode. Also you’d die. (Getty Stock Photo)

Kent expects that you wouldn’t even be in much of a condition to cry out or move around as the heat is so intense that the water in your body would boil to steam.

He said: “I think that you would be pretty rapidly overcome by heat, both conductive and radiant.

“If you are ever near an active lava flow the radiant heat is crippling at quite some distance from the lava — let alone lying right on top.”

So that’s what would happen to you if you were to fall into some lava, you would die a horribly painful death.

The only possible benefit is that it surely wouldn’t take too long to go, though however long it took would be pretty much the worst time of your life.

Remember that one guy who cooked some bacon and eggs on a volcano? It’d be you that was cooked.