Why don't the wildlings just melt a hole through the wall?

[Kyll.Ing.]

3 hours ago, Lord Asher said:

I think ot would be easier to dig a way under the wall, there was the caveways of Gendel and Gorne and the climbing too, why try to go trough it? It would be madness, it would be too slow, and if a Patrol shows by or pour water on the tunnel exit's they would be trapped.

I actually think the ground under the Wall is even harder than the Wall itself.

Once again, we're talking permafrost. That's a bit of a prerequisite for the Wall to stand, otherwise it would thaw from the bottom up (then again, the books mention orchards in Wildling villages north of the Wall, and that whole forest nearby, so Martin isn't consistent here). Anyway, the Wall is said to weep in warm weather, and that water would seep into the ground, where it'd freeze again. That means the Wall is standing on a broad strip of frozen, water-saturated soil. A mix of ice and rocks which would be hell to dig through. It's more or less reinforced ice. Unlike pure ice, which is crystalline and splits when battered, frozen soil has all sorts of rocks and dirt in it, preventing the formation of "cleavage planes" (if I remember correctly, that's the correct term). You'd have to crush it to icy gravel before you could move any of it anywhere.

If you somehow dug down to bedrock, you could get below the layer of ice, but then you have hundreds of meters - if not many kilometres - of rock to dig through. And then you get all sorts of underground problems that fantasy novels tend to overlook: Ventilation, ground water seeping in (most real-life mines have heavy-duty ventilation systems and pumps running constantly to prevent miners from suffocating or drowning), and you need to move all that mass somewhere. A two-by-two metre tunnel that's one kilometer long might sound like it'd leave a mere 4000 cubic metres of dirt, but once removed from the ground it takes a lot more room. You'd need to deposit as much as ten thousand cubic metres of dirt and rocks per kilometer of tunnel, far enough away from the Wall that the Watch doesn't discover it, but at the same time as close to it as possible, otherwise fresh air will be a huge problem for the miners.

 

The logistics of that operation would be too much for the Wildlings to organize. They need an inconspicuous mass deposit, tunnel reinforcement, pumps to keep the water out (not yet invented in Westeros), fans to blow fresh air (not yet invented in Westeros), and mining equipment capable of digging through rock and/or the permafrost layer (the Wildlings, apart from the Thenns, use tools of bone, wood and stone). The whole ordeal would take many, many years to complete, digging by hand is a slow process. At best possible speed, they might be able to do a meter per day. Arguably, they could use giants to speed up the digging process, but then they'd need to make the tunnels larger, so in the end they wouldn't gain anything.

That operation is hard enough even without considering they need to keep it all hidden from the Night's Watch, for years, while tying up a significant portion of the available manpower in the Haunted Forest. In the end, I think it'd be easier to try to chop their way through the ice.

[Light a wight tonight]

How old is the Wall? 8 kiloyears? It would have melted on its own in that time unless it was maintained magically. 

And as was already pointed out the Wildlings only wanted to raid beyond the Wall, not occupy the lands south of it. No reason to have a permanent way through, when that could be guarded anyhow.

[Bloodmane]

It is much easier to cut a "hole" (actually a tunnel)  in ice than to melt one. The biggest problem is directing the caloric energy toward the ice. If the wildlings would try to light bofires the energy would disipate in the environment. If they had a blowtorch on the other hand the job would be trivial - but the don't. A dargon could do the same trick.

 

 

[Forlong the Fat]

Let's assume for a moment that the wall is completely ice, and that there is no magic preventing its melting.   A plausible, though somewhat slow, method available to the wildlings would be to build a shed, or even a sort stone fireplace, against the wall, then move the fire forward slowly.  The floor of the tunnel would need a gradual incline to allow the water to drain out.  The largest problem would be the danger of cave ins, which might be inevitable given the wall's protective properties.  If done in very cold weather, however, the tunnel would quickly harden once the fire was taken away.  And we are only talking, given the 20 men abreast comment, about something like 120 feet at the top.  It may be somewhat wider at the bottom but not very much so as the face is nearly vertical.  Perhaps 200-300 feet?  That would be a fair bit of work, but we're not talking about building the Chunnel here.   If the original shed was made in a forested area, the work might be concealed fairly well.

[daccu65]

Like several others said, generating that much heat when your only source of heat is fire is not feasible...especially when the NW would observe the fire/woodcutting and the melting ice would be liable to put out the fire. 

Mance's plan, to send a distracting force towards the Shadow Tower, then send climbers over the wall and seize CB from behind and open the gate for the rest, was actually a pretty good plan.  The only thing that went wrong was sending a just-defected NW member with the raiding party.  It seems that Mance is too smart to make that mistake, so I wonder if he had planned for this "failure" the entire time.

 

[Protagoras]

With what? Their lightsabers?

[HouseHarrison]

The Wall is basically an arctic iceberg. You can't melt through ice that thick.

[Lord Asher Forrester]

Like i said there are other ways to pass across even if we risk out the underneath digging, there is the climbing, or they can go arround it trough the water, melting seems a little silly way, even if you have an army like Mance's...

But if that question wasn't "why dont the wildlings just melt a hole through the wall?" and instead it was: Is there any way the free folk could melt a hole trough the wall? See it is different they don't JUST do it because it is don't seem like an easy task, but it's completely not impossible. So who knows... maybe the wildlings can think another way to melt a way through with firemagic. There is not just dragonfire in this world, there are other ways of fire magic or alchemic like wildfire, or some bloodmagic that is not even fire but hypotetically could melt it, or even the Horn of Winter.

But if there is really a permafrost spell I don't see anything of it working ecxept maybe for the Horn of Winter if they have it.

 

[dreem24]

A giant once farted and got pretty far in the wall.  Only it sealed and he's stucked inside it if even alive that is..

[Lord Asher Forrester]

20 minutes ago, dreem24 said:

A giant once farted and got pretty far in the wall.  Only it sealed and he's stucked inside it if even alive that is..

Wow that was instructive