We know far more about the solar system and distant planets than we do about the rocks and dirt underneath us. People have spent their careers to discovering what is beneath the Earth’s surface, but without much success. A group of Soviet experts spent decades attempting to do exactly that. On one of their missions, they unearthed something hidden deep inside the Earth’s crust, making a momentous discovery that forced them to permanently shut down their machines. You are not going to believe what they discovered!
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Up Above and Down Below
With advancements in space technology, we can see through telescopes into the past and receive information from billions of miles apart. In fact, it took the same amount of time for NASA’s Voyager 1 satellite to leave the solar system and send information from 10.2 billion miles away as it did for researchers to travel seven miles below the Earth’s crust. So, what do we know about what is beneath us?
Up Above And Down Below
Lesser-Known Battle
During the well-known Space Race of the 1950s, Cold War foes the United States and the Soviet Union competed for space travel supremacy. The two scientific heavyweights fought to see who could learn more about the Earth’s atmosphere and beyond. While both countries achieved significant advances in space research, a lesser-known fight was taking place. Few people recall the other fascinating pursuit—the ambition of the countries’ top geologists was to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. But what made dirt and rocks so interesting?
Lesser Known Battle
What’s Inside?
You might believe that dirt and rocks are significantly less exciting than the cosmos. However, in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Americans and Soviets launched separate missions to drill boreholes through the planet’s outermost layer to learn more about what lies beneath the surface. Boreholes are typically dug for oil extraction, with few being dug solely for scientific purposes. Though not as mysterious as space, the Earth’s crust contains some intriguing secrets of its own.
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Mysterious Inner Layer
Drilling into the ground is analogous to installing a telescope inside the Earth’s crust. The crust is the planet’s outermost layer, consisting of the rocky shell that covers the outer 20 miles of the 4,000-mile trip to the Earth’s core.The mysterious mantle, the planet’s widest part, sits beneath the crust and has never been reached by drilling. This is because even the crust, the layer closest to the ground where we walk every day, is far too thick to dig through. So, how do scientists reach the center of the Earth?
Mysterious Inner Layer
Taking Shortcuts
Initially, scientists used shortcuts to get closer to the core, such as drilling through the sea. The Earth’s outer layer consists of two types of crust: continental and oceanic crusts. The land is on the continental crust, and the oceanic crust is beneath the seafloor. The continental sections are far more difficult to drill through due to their age and thickness. The newer oceanic crust is only four to six miles deep, making it easier to access the second layer via the water.
Taking Shortcuts
Project Mohole
In the early 1960s, scientists in the United States led the first initiative of its kind: drilling into the ocean. Their goal, just off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico, was to drill deep enough into the Pacific Ocean to reach the crust-upper mantle border. The project was called the Mohorovičić discontinuity (or “moho”), hence the funny name Project Mohole. Both sides shared the same goal: to go deep and uncover the mystery of the mantle. The Americans intended to provide a subterranean equivalent to the space race and outperform the Soviets, but their efforts were not as successful as they had planned.
Project Mohole
Project Shut Down
After five years of drilling, the project proved too expensive, and Project Mohole was abandoned hundreds of feet short of its aim. In 1966, the expedition was canceled because the few hundred feet of digging cost the United States almost $40 million in today’s money. The Americans only drilled 601 feet into the crust and never reached the mantle. This provided Soviet scientists with an excellent opportunity to take the lead.
Project Shut Down
The Russian Mission
Soviet scientists were significantly more tenacious, anxious to outperform the American team that had abandoned their effort four years before. In the spring of 1970, the Soviet crew began their expedition, drilling beneath the Arctic Circle’s continental crust. On May 24, 1970, researchers began drilling into the Kola Peninsula, located beneath the Pechengsky District of Murmansk, Russia. The goal was straightforward: drill as far as their instruments and technology would allow them to, exceeding the Americans’ prior efforts of 600 feet. Seems simple enough, right?
The Russian Mission
Into The Ground
The Soviet mission became known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole. However, before they could begin, they needed to construct specific drilling equipment to measure their findings because they were making significant discoveries in geology. They began drilling a number of nine-inch holes, each branching from a central hole in the earth. However, two years and 23,000 feet later, they needed to change their instruments again in order to drill deeper into the rocky ground.
Into The Ground
Ambitious Goal
In 1974, they installed their new equipment and increased their target to an astonishing 49,000 feet deep—a level no one had ever reached before. While the Soviets made poor progress, the two competing nations took turns in their quest to discover the Earth’s interior. However, the Americans were not giving up on their expedition and were ready to break their own record.
Ambitious Goal
The American Effort
In the same year, the Lone Star Producing Company in Washita County, Oklahoma, started drilling for oil. In approximately a year and a half, they built the “Bertha Rogers Hole,” a man-made well that is nearly six miles (31,441 feet) deep. This became the world’s deepest pit, but not for long. Lone Star was forced to halt their operation after encountering a hazardous sulfur gas deposit, but the Americans retained the record for five years—until the USSR re-entered the so-called Rock Race with a vengeance.
The American Effort
Kola Superdeep Borehole
After reaching this milestone, the team momentarily suspended their tools to allow for scientific investigation and celebrations at the site. The drill was still 10,000 feet shy of its target, but work was halted. They stopped drilling for a year while visitors came to see the site, and in 1983, it was exhibited in a geological show.After the celebrations, the experiment resumed. However, when they returned to continue drilling, a slew of technical issues caused them to come to a halt once more.
A Pause In Operations
Breakdown and Back Again
The drill failed in September 1984, after reaching another record-breaking height of 39,687 feet. A large chunk twisted off, and it took two years to repair the damage. New equipment had to be created, but drilling so deep into the ground presented its own set of challenges. However, the Soviet researchers would not be defeated. So they abandoned their earlier drilling and started over from the center at 23,000 feet. After three years of hard work, they achieved a record of 40,230 feet. That is 7.5 miles into the Earth!
Breakdown And Back Again
Something Unexpected
Their new record indicated that they were on target. The miners were encouraged, expecting the overall depth to reach 44,000 feet by 1990. They were confident that they would reach their major objective of 49,000 feet by 1993, but they encountered more equipment malfunctions after drilling a third and fourth holes. As progress slowed, people began to lose faith in the initiative. Nonetheless, they continued going. They weren’t expecting what was hiding in the tundra below. It was going to make their mission far more difficult.
Something Unexpected
Things are Heating Up
Things under ground might be unpredictable. Temperatures vary, and for the first 10,000 feet of their dig, the rock was consistent with what the researchers expected to find. However, as they moved deeper, the temperature rose. The temperature rose as they bore deeper into the mantle, and they anticipated that at 40,000 feet, the rock would reach 212°F. The scientists were shocked when the hole heated up significantly faster—to an astounding 356°F!
Things Are Heating Up
Strange Discovery
But this wasn’t their only discovery. They had literally broken fresh ground and were finding more discoveries as they dug deeper into the pit. The researchers also discovered that the granite at this depth was far less dense than they had anticipated, resulting in an entirely unexpected reaction. Intense heat and pressure transformed the hole’s texture and density, causing it to behave more like plastic than rock. This plastic-like texture, combined with the extremely high temperature, made drilling nearly impossible.
Strange Discovery
Mission Abandoned
The team was aware that their equipment could not withstand such unforeseen alterations. Temperatures at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole had surpassed 300°F! The drill bits began to alter shape, and the rock was so plastic that the hole began to close anytime the drill was removed. Despite making previously unheard-of discoveries, the researchers understood their voyage to the center of the Earth was complete. And by 1992, 22 years after its inception, the grandiose project was abandoned.
Mission Abandoned
Long Mission
Kola’s team has been digging intermittently for the past 22 years. Prior to their journey, Earth-related research was mostly limited to seismic activity in tectonic plates and surface observations. The Kola Borehole allowed scientists to test geological hypotheses for the first time by looking directly inside the Earth. At its deepest point, the Superdeep Borehole penetrated 7.5 miles into the Earth’s crust. However, their aim of reaching the mantle was still far from realized, as it is estimated that the mantle does not begin until roughly 22 miles below the surface.
Long Mission
Miles to Go
It took them 22 years to get this deep underground, yet the drill barely got one-third of the way into the Earth’s crust before the project was abruptly halted. The distance they excavated is deeper than an inverted Mount Everest, yet given the Earth’s diameter of 7,918 miles, they barely scraped the surface—literally. The hole was only nine inches broad at its furthest point, but the long and tough drilling operation was worthwhile in order to create the world’s deepest hole.
Miles To Go
Other Discoveries
It wasn’t all for nothing, however. Before closing the hole permanently, researchers discovered some surprising and very essential insights about the Earth’s geology. Like the discovery of organic activity beneath the ground! They have clear proof that life existed under the surface billions of years ago. The hole was too small for anything other than the drill bit to get through, so no one could ever go inside. However, this did not prevent the researchers from uncovering an intriguing discovery about halfway down.
Other Discoveries
Life Underground?
Halfway into the cavern, the researchers discovered tiny minuscule fossils over four miles beneath the Earth’s surface. They discovered evidence of 24 species of single-cell plankton microfossils. What’s more remarkable is that they remained amazingly intact despite the fact that the rock they were encased in was supposed to be almost two billion years old! The most groundbreaking discovery, however, would be made at the cavern’s deepest point.
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Groundbreaking Discoveries
Before these holes were bored, researchers used seismic waves to assess the type of rock within the earth. Previously, scientists believed that the crust’s rock progressively transforms from granite to basalt at depths of two to four miles below the surface. The Soviet scientists were startled to see that this pattern did not hold true on the Kola Peninsula. Instead, they discovered that the rock composition was entirely formed of granite, even at the earth’s core. This helped them understand the metamorphic changes in the rocks. But they were about to make their largest discovery yet: something incredible buried deep under the earth’s crust.
Groundbreaking Discoveries
Subterranean Water
The discovery of running water several miles down, which they had not expected to see, was arguably the most astonishing. This was an unexpected discovery, and some people even felt that finding water inside the Earth showed the Bible was real! Of course, the researchers had a scientific explanation: they believed that subterranean water originated as a result of high pressure driving oxygen and hydrogen out of rock crystals. Following this, impermeable rocks prevented water from flowing, trapping the newly produced water beneath the earth’s surface.
Subterranean Water
Leaving Kola Behind
With all these discoveries made, the team left the project behind. The shutdown of the Kola Superdeep Borehole coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union, resulting in reduced financing for fundamental scientific research. Drilling deeper was eventually considered impracticable and was halted in 1992, with the project permanently shut down in 1995. The hole has now been sealed with a welded metal plate. Today, the site appears to be nothing more than a collapsing building with a metal top, effectively sealing what is nonetheless a pivotal moment in history.
Leaving Kola Behind
What Still Remains
The Kola Superdeep Borehole is located six miles north of Zapolyarny, Murmansk Oblast, Russia. Today, 30 years later, the site bordering Norway remains classified as an environmental danger. Visitors can still visit the sparsely populated village to explore treasures preserved from the revolutionary Soviet experiment. The caps that seal the individual boreholes are still visible, but it appears that they will not be opened anytime soon. The estimated depth of the structures beneath the crust indicates that, despite a 22-year effort, the Soviets only drilled 0.02% of the way to the Earth’s center.
What Still Remains
Legendary Expedition
No borehole today is as famous as the Kola Superdeep. It provided scientists with extremely vital information on the composition of our planet, as well as a glimpse into the past, at what lay beneath the surface on which we walk now. No one has ever been able to drill deep enough to reach the mantle, but researchers are continuously looking for mysteries beneath the Earth’s surface and have yet to technically break the seven-mile mark, despite technological breakthroughs. However, this does not imply that people have not tried.
Legendary Expedition
Closest Competitor
For two decades, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was the world’s longest borehole by measured depth, but it was exceeded in 2008 by another well. Oil company Maersk Oil built a well in Qatar’s Al-Shaheen field that reached a remarkable 40,318 feet in measured depth, breaking the global record for the largest borehole in terms of measured depth! However, in terms of genuine vertical depth, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is still the deepest borehole in the world.
Closest Competitor
New Subterranean Adventures
The Earth’s deep interior has yet to be directly explored, and it’s unclear if it ever will be. Scientists have attempted to explain why developments in space travel appear to be far ahead of efforts to reach the center of the Earth. “Going into space is just a lot easier than going down for an equivalent distance,” David Stevenson, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, told Discover. “Going down from 5 kilometers to 10 is much harder than going from zero to 5.”
New Subterranean Adventures
Looking to the Future
The Soviet borehole was dug almost fifty years ago and is still the world’s deepest man-made point. The original projects are long gone, and the boreholes have been unopened for decades. Researchers continue to face underground challenges such as severe temperatures and unstable rocks, yet people remain fascinated about what lies underneath. Who knows, perhaps there may be another massive subterranean exploration in the near future? There are clearly numerous secrets waiting to be discovered underground.
Looking To The Future