The Kola Superdeep Borehole
Have you ever wondered if it was possible to dig a deep hole all the way to the other side of the planet? Or did your geography knowledge make you more aware of how near impossible it is to make advanced technology able enough to penetrate the Earth’s multiple layers and surpass the intense heat from the core? Regardless - there have been attempts to dig a deep hole through the Earth’s crust!
The Kola Superdeep Borehole lying today is the name of the hole created through a scientific drilling attempt to dig as deeply into the crust as possible. This site is located in the Pechengsky district, towards the Russian border with Norway situated on the Norway Peninsula. Using the technology of the Uralmash-4E (and later U-15000) drilling rig, the deepest man-made hole in history began to be created on 24 th May 1970 with the deepest one measuring 12,262 metres. This project took about 20 years to reach. It is the deepest vertical borehole in the world and stood as the longest depth-wise borehole for two years as well before it was surpassed by the 12,289 metre long Al Shaheen Oil Well in Qatar in 2008.
But why did the engineers and scientists give up? Why did they stop drilling further? As guessed below the surface billions of years old rock at temperatures around 180 degrees celsius stood twice much hotter than predicted - this began deforming drill bits and pipes - even the rocks themselves were more malleable, behaving like scientists said as ‘plastics’. As there was not suitable equipment and technology, the digging had to stop and the borehole was capped.
The deepest hole was a treasure trove for scientists and researchers. It was discovered that there is a lot of water underground - this led to inferences that the water is trapped in the rocks that make up the mantle and parts of the crust in forms of hydrangea dn oxygen atoms - the drilling released some of these trapped gases which reacted to produce water - however this is an interpretation of the discoveries found. Microscopes plankton fossils were also found around 6.7 km below the surface - around 24 different species of these were recorded during the project and can date back to their origins from millions of years ago.
