8/18/2023 0 Comments Drill drThe German borehole has been spared the fate of the others. Now the desolate site is a destination for adventurous tourists. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union there was no money to fund such projects – and three years later the whole facility was closed down. This was twice what was expected at that depth and drilling deeper was no longer possible. Drilling was stopped in 1992, when the temperature reached 180C (356F). ![]() Then it was the turn of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. ![]() “In places like Oman you can find mantle close to the surface, but that’s mantle as it was millions of years ago. “The ultimate goal of the project is to get actual living samples of the mantle as it exists right now,” says Sean Toczko, programme manager for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science. There used to be common understanding among Western scientists that the crust was so dense 5km down that water could not permeate through it.” “When the Russians started to drill they claimed they had found free water – and that was simply not believed by most scientists. One of the main motivations was that the Russians were simply not really open with their data. “And there was certainly competition between us. “It was in the time of the Iron Curtain when the drilling was started,” says Uli Harms of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, who as a young scientist worked on the German rival to the Kola borehole. The giant hangar built for an Arctic airship.What was it like to work in the world's biggest building.The ghostly radio station no-one claims to run.During the Cold War, there was a race by the superpowers to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust – and even to reach the mantle of the planet itself. The Soviets’ superdeep borehole isn’t alone. It took the Soviets almost 20 years to drill this far, but the drill bit was still only about one-third of the way through the crust to the Earth’s mantle when the project came grinding to a halt in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. The 40,230ft-deep (12.2km) construction is so deep that locals swear you can hear the screams of souls tortured in hell. ![]() This is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth. In the middle of the crumbling building is a heavy, rusty metal cap embedded in the concrete floor, secured by a ring of thick and equally rusty metal bolts.Īccording to some, this is the entrance to hell. Yet amidst the natural beauty stand the ruins of an abandoned Soviet scientific research station. The lakes, forests, mists and snow of the Kola Peninsula, deep in the Arctic Circle, can make this corner of Russia seem like a scene from a fairy tale. * This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2019” collection.
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