Kola: a report explains what the USSR found in the world's deepest borehole

@ElentirENG ES 1·10·2023 · 9:51 0

In the history of explorations there is a paradox: human beings have sent objects into space, but there are still things that we do not know about Earth.

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While some are thinking about man's first visit to Mars, there are depths of the globe that remain inaccessible to us. Beneath the oceans, the world's deepest depression is the Mariana Trench, located in the western Pacific. In 1960, the Trieste bathyscaphe was able to submerge up to 11,034 meters below sea level, being the deepest area reached by a human being.

However, the deepest man-made object reached 12,262 meters below the Earth's surface. This hitherto unbroken record was reached in 1989 in the Kola Superdeep Borehole, then in the USSR and currently in Russian territory. The drilling of this borehole was done for scientific purposes and began on May 24, 1970, encountering many problems and accidents due to the enormous pressure and high temperatures that the drills used had to face.

Although searching for this borehole on Google some images of quarries appear, the truth is that it was a relatively narrow drilling hole, and that in successive drilling it gave rise to a network of grooves similar to the roots of a tree. After it was abandoned in 1992, this is what the wellhead looks like today, with a metal seal covering the entrance.

There are many legends about this superdeep borehole. One of the best known is the one that states that hell was reached in that well and that screams, cries and supplications were recorded in it. It is nothing more than a myth, and I sincerely doubt the veracity of any recording circulating on the net claiming that it was done in that well. Leaving these stories aside, a report from the YouTube channel Kosmo explains what the USSR found in that well, some very interesting findings from a scientific point of view, although it must be taken into account that the well only managed to drill a minimal part of what is the Earth crust:

You can see here the location of the old Kola super-deep well facilities on Google Maps:

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Photos: Sputnik / Quo.