Kola: The World’s Deepest Hole

27:42So, you know, getting those pictures of what things look like in their sort of undisturbed state is beneficial. Right. And if you're like, all these seem kind of flimsy, holes are, they're super deep holes, are the greatest example of humans' curiosity just for the sake of knowing something new. Yeah. Then you'll find just about anywhere. Yeah. Don't stifle that, people. No. Get with the program. So another question you might have is, why did it take so long? And why is it so hard to do? And why aren't we able to just go deeper and deeper and deeper? Like, why they have to stop? Kind of all those big questions.

28:22Right. And it's, you know, they didn't realize until they got started. I don't think they thought it was going to be a cakewalk, but they didn't realize until they really started digging down there that it's not the easiest thing in the world to do. And there's a lot of complications that can arise. They didn't at first. You found this YouTube site called Half as Interesting. Yeah. They were talking about the drill bits. Like they did a great job through granite. They have, you know, it's like a boring drill bit. It's like a, you know, like a windy cone with like teeth on the outside of it to, you know, to bore a hole.

28:53It's kind of stuff they use to like bore subway tunnels and, you know, all kinds of tunnels through mountain. But in this case, they're going straight down. Those can only work for about four hours until you need to replace that bit. Like the bit wears off. And that's only about 30 feet or so depending on where you're digging and how hard that rock is. And then you can't just pop it off like a drill you get from the hardware store. and pop on another one. Those bits took, you know, sometimes eight hours or more to change over. Then you start drilling again. And then once they hit about 4.3 miles, it was pretty smooth sailing up into that point.

29:28Then it got much more dense. And then things got just really, really tough at that point. Yeah. The density of the rock really presented like a big problem for them. Like up to that point, like you said, it was pretty easy. It was just monotonous. Now it was really hard. They were on a frontier of vertical underground hole digging. And the reason why the density of the rock proved to be problematic is the denser rock would just push the drill bit over into less dense rock. So it made it really hard to keep going straight down because the drill bit, it needs to get purchased, but it's way easier to get purchased in less dense rock than the dense rock it's trying to go directly vertically through.

30:16That created also a lesser-known thing about the Kola Superdeep borehole, and that is it is not a single straight vertical shaft. Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way. Like, they just drilled straight down. But when they encounter that really, really tough rock, the drill bit will, like, get kicked to the side, starts going a different way. You know, they tried to, you know, that presents problems in and of itself. Like, they tried to use steel pipes to reinforce the sides as they went. Right. a la Charlie Brunson in The Great Escape. But the deeper they went, those pipes, you know, were having trouble withstanding the pressure.

30:52So they might break or they might kick out of line. And then they have to fill that hole up to where they were, go back above it, and then drill down around it. And so the, you know, it looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down. And, you know, if they had too much, like a drill bit broke off completely or maybe the sides that piping caved in too much and they couldn't get around it, they would have to go on like a fishing expedition to try and get that stuff out. And that would that would knock them offline for days at a time. Yeah. The article by Charlotte Wrigley says that one of their fishing trips took five years, five years.

31:33And so to get around the rock and also to keep from just standing around for five years, they would start another hole. But the reason why everybody calls it the super deep bore hole, not bore holes, is because there is one central shaft and then the other holes branch off of that. Yeah, exactly. Right? So the depth that they got to, 12 ,262 meters, that's the depth. The actual length that they drilled all over the place is, I'm not, I didn't see the actual length, but it seems like it's a lot more than that. Yeah, for sure. So they still, they kind of figured out a workaround for the rock density problem.

32:18And then I think at about, well, 10 ,000 feet, less than or just over 3 ,000 meters, they encountered an issue that they couldn't, they found they eventually couldn't overcome. Yeah. And that was temperature. They kind of had guesstimated correctly up into that point what the temperature was about going to, you know, what it was, they thought it was going to be at least. And they were like, that'll be fine. But once they reached that point, there was a big jump. It went from, what was the initial number, like 214 or so degrees all the way up to 356 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius. And that was about 12 clicks down, about seven and a half miles.

33:02And as you heard at the beginning, it only went down 7.6 miles. So it was the heat that got them. The heat. My God, the heat. Not even the humidity. The heat. Right. Although we will find it's possible that it's humid down there. Oh, what a tease. That's a really great example of how the super deep borehole, like, rewrote science. They mapped it all out there. Like, we're going to get to 15 kilometers because we'll be able to withstand the temperatures until then. And then all of a sudden it got way hotter, way faster. So much so that basically what happened with the pressure and the temperature together turned the rock in that area essentially plasticky and not even like a hard plastic, like a Clorox bleach bottle.

33:54It was like a squishy plastic. And it was basically like nailing Jell-O brand gelatin to the wall. That was what they were trying to do at that point. Yeah. So, I mean, at that point, it was net. It was over. They realized that they had gone as far as they could go. That was 1989, like I said at the beginning. They kept trying for another few years, I think, until 1992. Yeah. And then they were like, yeah, this is really over. And I think the whole project was officially sealed in 2005. But, I mean, they had a lot of employees and stuff, you know, that were on the books. I think they weren't even paying them for a while, right?

34:35Right. I think at its peak, there were like 700 people who were employed there. And if you look at pictures of the place when it was in full swing, it looks like a huge factory with one single giant smokestack. And that's actually where the derrick for the drill bit went. But it's like a little mini town almost. But as it got shut down further and further and they finally fully mothballed it in 2008, those last few employees, yeah, they hadn't been paid in six months. but the reason why it really stopped in 1992 is because they had bigger fish to fry which was their country had dissolved and now they had to figure out where to get funding from and it turned out that none of the oligarchs were in any particular mood to keep funding the super deep borehole especially because it hadn't gotten anywhere in three or four years yeah, it was a, you know any stagnant project like that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shutter I think Yeah, unfortunately so.

35:33All right, maybe we should take a break, and we'll talk about what we learned from this super deep borehole.

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37:02The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it. Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, why is it important that Americans know about it? Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself. I'm Rebecca Nagle, Goheen Dawadon, Jalika Yetli Gayla, citizen of Cherokee Nation. Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell yeah. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment.

37:52Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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39:15All right. So we actually discovered a lot, scientifically speaking, by going down that low. The first thing they did was like, well, I guess let's do the obvious thing and change our temperature maps. because now we know at what point it gets like super, super hot. So who's got an eraser? Ivan, you have an eraser. You have the only eraser in the room. Step forward and change those numbers. And they're like, that's a great start. And let's move on from here. Right. So that was one thing. They also disproved something that had been around since the 30s. So we talked about the Moho discontinuity, which is between the mantle and the crust.

39:56way further down than they went. But they had expected to go through another discontinuity that was in the upper crust. It was upper crust. The Conrad discontinuity, which was also based on the same thing. This guy Conrad paying attention to seismographic waves suddenly accelerating or speeding up when it hit this one point in the crust. It's like there's a discontinuity there. I predict that it's a difference between granite and basalt, that we've got the granite up top and then it transitions into basalt. And where they meet, that's that discontinuity. And it turned out that that was not correct.

40:37And they were kind of mean about it. They called Conrad's descendants and told them and mocked them over the phone. Yeah. Well, I thought it was Conrad Bain and that they called Todd Bridges. His heir. Victor Conrad. You know what just occurred to me? I believe when I said discontinuity, I bet you that's how the Brits say it. I'll bet you're right. I'd love to hear from our Brit friends about that. I would love to hear that, too. We ought to ask Kyle. Yeah, but then we'd have to send a voice message. And I wonder what Kyle sounds like, actually. I wonder what all of our writers sound like. We know what Dave sounds like because we met him.

41:12Yeah, that's a great question. You just blew my top. What if, like, we love Livia so much. What if we got in touch with Libby and she was like, gentleman. She was like a Julia child or something. That would be so fun. It would be quite surprising. All right. So you teased liquid very cheekily earlier. And they discovered that there was liquid water down there, like much, much deeper than they thought water could exist. They found these cracks that had saline filled water. And they were like, this shouldn't be here. This is crazy. Like liquid is actually flowing down here. the Soviets, like, released that information, and most of the world at first was like, yeah, right.

41:53Like, we're going to buy that coming from you. Right. So, yeah, the first 14 years from 1970 to 1984, the USSR, which was very famous for keeping its scientific progress and findings secret, it didn't share anything about this. I'm not even sure the outside world knew that they were digging a hole. And then in 1984, at a geological conference, like a World Geological Conference, that they actually held in Moscow. They announced that they had dug the world's deepest hole and blew everyone away. And it seems like the reason that they held this conference in 1984 was that they just had dug the world's deepest hole and they wanted to tell everybody.

42:35Yeah, but it's kind of funny that they didn't believe certain parts of it because it was coming from the former Soviet Union, you know. Right. Well, this was full-on Soviet Union, too, in 1984. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, they were like, how? How would this even happen? Like, explain to us how there's water. Yeah. So what they found out was that, well, at first they thought that it was squeezed out of crystals, perhaps. Pretty good guess. But they found out the opposite was true because a study in 2023, they found out that when these continental plates subduct, which we've talked a lot about lately, like go under one another and into the mantle in this case, they take water with them along the way.

43:15And that can make it all the way to that outer core. It interacts with that molten iron, I think, and creates this like kind of filmy gook between the core. And then that presses into crystals. Right. Did you know that you could press water into crystals? I didn't know any of this stuff. No. I also didn't know you could get water from crystals. But think about like the mind-boggling pressure that suggests are going on at this point in the earth, you know? Yeah, for sure. It's so cool. Probably the biggest thing that everybody's socks were knocked off by was that they were like, oh, yeah, by the way, seven kilometers down, almost four and a half miles under the Earth's surface, we found marine organism fossils dating back like two billion years.

44:05Top that, comrades. pretty fun and i bet they were spooky looking uh like uh like uh you know i saw a garfish the other day when i was paddleboarding in a lake and i almost fell off because i looked down and it was right at the surface on my left and you know a garfish this was like two and a half feet long yeah i reacted so it was such a start i went oh my god that i lost my balance and i almost fell off the paddleboard. Man. And then I had a fear of, you know, this thing was some prehistoric creature that was going to attack me once I was in the water, which is, of course, not true. That thing was out of there the second it saw me.

44:43Right. But I just imagine these fossils down there. I mean, these things had to have, like, teeth. They had to be creepy, right? I don't know. I didn't see any pictures of them. Two billion years ago, I'm not sure. I've got a picture in my mind. It looks like an alligator gar. Okay, that's great. Let's go with that. All right. But the thing is, is that it doesn't suggest, as a lot of sites who sensationalize this super deep borehole, as we'll see, this doesn't mean that these things were ever dwelling like four and a half miles beneath the Earth's surface. Right, right, right. These were embedded two billion years ago and then carried down through the cross toward the mantle as part of that amazing plate tectonic process that keeps the Earth going.

45:28Yeah, I mean, what I wonder is if, I mean, this was started in 1970, discontinued in 1989. That was a long time ago. And I wonder if it's possible with today's technology to reach the mantle and if anyone is interested in that anymore. I wondered if it was if I think I'm sure that there are geologists and scientists who are still quite interested in doing that. They want to. Right. They want to. The funding dollars. Exactly. Yeah, because I don't know that there's much to be gained from reaching the mantle if you're a fossil fuel company. And if you're not getting money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it from fossil fuel companies.

46:13They probably, I would estimate, fund 90 % of the holes that are being dug around the world right now. They're like, is there a giant bag of money down there? Exactly, yeah. They're like, no, no, but. Not exactly. Well, you've lost my ear. Yeah, they're like, get rid of this guy. So, yes, though, it's possible that some scientists will make it to the mantle. And the reason why is because they will be drilling not through, you know, super thick parts of the crust, but thin, thin parts of the oceanic crust. Right. And that counts. It definitely counts because you're still reaching the mantle. Yeah, exactly.

46:52No, there's some places where the crust is so thin. How thin is it? It's so thin, it's only five and a half kilometers thick. And that is, yeah, that's, you know, almost a third of the depth of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Yeah, that's 1960s level digging. Exactly. So there was actually a group that I guess was attempting that. They dug in a site off the coast of Costa Rica. they dug hole 1256D. They need to step up their naming convention, I think. Maybe that stands for dominoes. It probably doesn't say sponsored it. The NOID was on board. Yeah. In the early 2000s, they started digging, and I guess the NOID got bored and stopped giving them money.

47:40Yeah, yeah. How far did they get? Stopped at 1.25 kilometers. Which is so shallow. We're not even going to bother translating that into miles. Exactly. But kind of one of the fun things is they removed an intact piece of crust and I guess dipped it in some marinara. I couldn't resist. This went so off the rails with the Domino's theme that I really tried to avoid and then embraced. If you like their marinara, you should try their garlic butter dipping sauce. Man, why don't they sponsor us? I don't know. They really should. I wish these were ads, everybody. I would probably do Domino's ads for free pizza.

48:20I am ashamed. Well, not ashamed. I'm proud to say maybe I haven't had a Domino's pizza since probably college. That's our go-to pizza if we get giant chain pizza. Really? Yeah. I still love Domino's. I guess I don't get any giant chain pizza. Not as a stand. We just have so many good pizzerias in Atlanta all over the place. Yes, that is true. There are not as many in Florida. Okay. I don't know why, but there's not. But yes, Atlanta is filthy rich with really good pizza places. I thought you were going to say that, like, Yumi and MoMA wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get there in 30 minutes.

48:54Right. Or it's free. I'm hungry now, Josh. You know that. Yeah, no, there's just not that many around here. All right. Well, maybe we can take a meeting with sales and turn this into liquid gold. Yeah, can I have your free dominoes if that's how they pay us? Okay, sweet. We should mention this last little addendum. It was kind of fun. The Germans, of course, they tried to dig a deeper hole in the 90s, and they actually got to some higher temperatures. Their bits, the German bits, were able to withstand 500 degrees Fahrenheit or 260 degrees Celsius. So that was a big breakthrough. But they stopped at about 5.6 miles down or 9 kilometers.

49:40but the cool part about this is they got a Dutch artist named Lotte Geven I'm not sure if that's pronounced right she lowered her microphone down in there obviously protected by heat shields and stuff like that dropped it down that German borehole and picked up a very rumbling sound that science still cannot explain and she said it made her feel very small first time in my life this big ball that we live on came to life and it sounded haunting. And she said some people thought it sounded like hell or like the planet was breathing. So it's like, you know, that came from an old Russian sort of suspicion that they were digging into hell, right?

50:23Yeah, there was an urban legend that started about the time they stopped digging at the borehole that said that the reason that they stopped digging was because they had punctured through the roof of hell and that somebody had lowered a microphone down and they captured the sounds of tormented souls in hell screaming. And there are actual YouTube videos that present this seriously. And you can go hear it, and it's the most ridiculous thing you'll hear today. But I also want to point out that, what is it, Lottie Girvin? Givin? Yeah, Givin. Yeah. Like you said that scientists can't explain the sound that she actually did record.

51:09That's not to say like it's a supernatural sound. They're just like there's so many processes going on down there. We so little understand that part of the earth. We can't say what makes that sound. But we think it's a pretty cool sound and maybe someday we will be able to explain it. What they are quite sure about is that it's not the sounds of hell. Yeah, because that's not a real place. Yeah. You should go listen to our episode on Hell, people. It was a pretty good one. Yeah. You know, I imagine there's just sounds, like a groan or, you know, something moving around probably makes a sound, right?

51:43Yeah. It sounds really, really industrial, but there's no pattern to it. So, like, a dispatterned industrial sound is what it sounds like. And it's still, it's pretty faint. I bet some German musician turned that into a beat or something. Right. Yeah. Uh, let's see. I think that's about it. Yeah, that's about it. Great. Okay. Well, that was the Cola Super Deep Oarhole, everybody. Hope you enjoyed it. Sorry for the anal bleaching references. And, um, I guess since I mentioned anal bleaching again, it's time for listener mail. In fairness, you can't talk about the Cola Super Deep Oarhole without talking about that.

52:24Agreed. you know alright I'm gonna call this feedback from the MASH episode hey guys thank you for the episode on MASH I was 7 years old in 1972 and I really loved the show so much that I learned to play the theme song on the piano my parents were too happy to find out that the song discussed suicide but I don't even think I knew what that was at the time also there was at least one episode because you guys talk about the camp moving where there was a bug out where the camp moved closer or farther from the front line And we got someone else that wrote in that said the same thing. Oh, yeah. And sort of the joke on the show was that it was like kind of exactly the same.

53:01Okay. Because they clearly didn't move the set. And then Dana Carson from Cleveland also says this. It never occurred to me, actually, that BJ and Hawkeye were alcoholics. I just assumed they drank to pass the time. Yeah, sure. Just like alcoholics. Right. Yeah, I mean, I threw that word around, you know. It was just sort of supposed to be funny. Maybe they were just enjoyed drinking in the hellish war they were in to pass the time. Yeah, I think it was a device to just show like you had to self-medicate or else you'd go crazy from the horror of the whole thing. And that is Dana Carson from Cleveland who says in a PS, I've been to Toledo and Tony Pakos many times.

53:42Awesome. Way to go, Dana. Right? Dana. Great. Thanks a lot, Dana. There's actually a Dana Corporation in around Toledo, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe it's named after you, Dana. You should go find out. Cool. If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo, say like Libby or Owens or Jeep, we want to hear from you. You can email us at stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

54:12Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

54:27Can superstars even exist the way they used to? 2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce at that point. I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna. What does it mean to be Black and eat in America? You will never make me feel bad for being a Black girl, for being a Black American girl, ever. From music to food to the conversations shaping Black culture right now, Therapy for Black Girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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