We have to travel to the deepest part of western Russia to find the Kola Superdeep Borehole (Kola’s superdeep borehole, KSB), it is the deepest hole that humans have dug on Earth. Its depth is 12 kilometers, 12,262 meters exactly. It is deeper than the deepest point in the ocean.
To find out, you will have to look for a small collection of irregular scrap where, if you rummage through the rubble, you will find a large metal disc bolted to the ground. It is not just any disk: it is the closed lid of this particular well.
Where are you from?
Soviet scientists drilled the Earth’s surface during the 1970s to find out more about the contents of the Earth’s crust. It is an unprecedented excavation that is still standing, and the drilling technology they had to develop to get down there is quite remarkable.
But what did we learn from this excavation work?
To start with, discover that there was water 12 kilometers from the earth’s crust, which scientists would not even have believed possible if they had not seen it with their own eyes.
And almost 7 kilometers away, they found microscopic fossils of 24 species of single-celled organisms that had long since died.
They also gained access to 2.7 billion-year-old rocks, although these rocks became a challenge that scientists were never able to overcome due to their soaring temperatures. This was in 1994.
The deepest artificial point on planet Earth is only 23 centimeters wide and began as a scientific duel.
American and Soviet engineers were trying – at the same time as in the space race – also to overcome themselves in the underground kingdom. It is possible that the United States won the race to the Moon, but its “Project Mohole” , started in 1958 on the Pacific coast of Mexico, lost funds and the Americans stopped drilling in 1966; However, the Russians kept going until the early 1990s.
As a result, the KSB was generated, which consisted of several perforations attached to a single original hole. The deepest is called SG-3.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of new geological data was obtained through SG-3, but the paleontological revelations we discussed earlier caught everyone by surprise. The Smithsonian Museum explains that about 4 miles deep, microscopic 2 billion-year-old plankton fossils were found fairly intact, regardless of the environmental conditions at the site.
Similar drilling projects, such as the Mohole Project and more recent ones, tend to stop due to lack of funds. Kola was abandoned in the early 1990s because temperatures were unsustainable – 180 ° C.
All of this may seem like a pretty impressive feat of engineering, and it is, but the well is hardly a wound on Earth. With an equatorial radius of 6,378 kilometers, this vertical chasm represents a mere 0.19% of the way to the center of the planet.
Could we go on?
The oceanic crust is, on average, no less than 7 kilometers deep. The continental crust is somewhat less dense, but it is much thicker, averaging about 35 kilometers thick. At those depths, the pressures and temperatures are too great for nothing to remain mechanically intact. That complicates the job.
