[Cyph0n]

How about while drilling 1000s of meters underground? How do you transmit data back to the surface? This is a problem faced by oil drilling and exploration companies, and they have a solution for it. Take a guess what it is...

Mud modulation.

Basically, while drilling, mud is pumped down the drill string and back out for cooling and cleaning purposes.

Some genius at one of the major oil drilling companies (maybe Schlumberger?) came up with the crazy idea of modulating the mud pressure to transmit information into the depths of the earth. You can control the drill bit speed, angle of drilling, and monitor all sorts of diagnostics over a mud-based communication channel. The bandwidth is decent (think: dial-up), especially when the drilling tools use an efficient modulation scheme.

It's amazing stuff to see first-hand.

[orf]

That's... both crazy and ingenious in one package. I love it.

[trhway]

>both crazy and ingenious in one package.

wait until you see the NSA mud-pipe-tap.

[dom0]

I've failed to track down who invented it; but a 1993 patent by Schlumberger describes this already as prior art (US5237540).

Very clever...