The Pentagon's science fringe has been trying to lord over the natural elements for years now. They've talked about planet hacking and screwing with enemy climates, and they still want to harness the power of lightning.

This year, military science has more of an "all-encompassing" goal for global mastery. As part of its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon extreme research agency Darpa is launching the "Transparent Earth" project. They'll invest $4 million into the creation of real-time, 3-D maps that display "the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth."

At first, the idea doesn't sound all that impressive. The earth is more than 3,500 miles deep, from crust to core, so Darpa's plan would literally just scratch at the surface. But geologists and geophysicists still know very little about the day-to-day goings-on underground, even at a depth as shallow as 5 km (that's 3.1 miles). The deepest drilling of the planet was a Soviet hole on the Kola Peninsula, which took 19 years and made it around 7.5 miles into the crust, and even NASA still uses land-based GPS signals to predict volcanic eruptions.

Rather than a mega-drill, Darpa wants to harness innovations in sensor technology to develop a constantly-updating model of planetary activity. They'll use sensors to detect "natural indicators of subsurface activity," and then take advantage of mathematical algorithms designed to estimate various natural earthly phenomena, including geophysical turbulence and shifting tectonic plates.

Algorithms are already used in planetary mapping and predictive science, but adding high-tech sensors would provide a constant stream of new data. And that kind of accuracy could have serious planetary implications: Changes in the earth's crust can explain and predict volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and even the formation of mountain ranges.

After they successfully combine sensors and mathematics, Darpa's end goal would put even NASA's satellite footage to shame:

A global three-dimensional picture of the earth's subsurface with variable spatial, temporal, and information resolution, allowing changes at local scales to propagate through both physical models and proximity rules to update the global picture.

So maybe Darpa wants to protect civilian populations from the ravages of natural disasters. But those same tools could be used for military purposes against enemies, suspects one unnamed geoscientist. "All of my 'science is good!' tree-hugging comments aside, what this program is probably really about is detecting, targeting, and destroying hard and buried underground facility (UGF) targets," he said.

Whatever Darpa's intention, they want their transparent earth sooner rather than later: The agency anticipates that the new 3-D models will be available to the Army, Air Force, special operations and intelligence agencies by 2015.

Photo: NASA

ALSO: