2023-12-05 05:34:32
In June of this year, ABC told you that, on the same day that China sent its first civilian into space to launch the Tiangong space station, it also began “a much more mysterious mission on Earth.” The communist government had begun to dig a vertical well with the intention of reaching up to 11 kilometers deep in the middle of the desert. Specifically, in a region rich in oil through the Earth’s crust that, according to the brief note from the state news agency Xinhua, will reach the Cretaceous layer. That is, rocks up to 145 million years old.
To give you an idea of the dimensions of the hole, oil drillings usually descend between 1,000 and 1,600 meters, although they can reach up to 2,000. More than 5,000 meters is already something extraordinary. The 11 kilometers planned by the Beijing Government is a brutality that they hope to achieve in 457 days. Still, it is not the deepest that has been dug.
On May 24, 1970, the Soviet Union began drilling a well in Pechenga, a sparsely populated district of the Murmansk region in the northwestern corner of Russia. The work lasted until 1989 and reached 12,262 meters, a depth that man had never reached before or since. Not even China will now dare to go down there, despite the fact that current technology, engineering and security measures are much more advanced than in Soviet times.
That project was baptized as the ‘Kola’ super deep well. The idea was born in 1962 and supervision was assigned to the Interdepartmental Scientific Council for the study of the Earth. The exact location of the drilling was chosen in 1965, 10 kilometers from the city of Zapolyarny. The most surprising thing is that the initial goal he set was to descend to 15,000 meters. The difference between this and other deep holes is that the others were made to search for oil, while the Soviet one, also known as SG-3, was made solely to investigate the lithosphere.
A confusing objective
The Chinese well will be used to test underground drilling machines and collect data about the Earth’s interior, according to first information. What is not so clear is what the communist giant wants to achieve in the long term. The project is part of the deep Earth exploration program that President Xi Jinping already announced in 2021. The leader claimed that studies had to be carried out to identify energy resources, raw materials and evaluate the risks of natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions. and earthquakes.
The president of the Illustrious Official College of Geologists (ICOG), Manuel Regueiro, told Isabel Miranda on ABC that he saw it as more plausible that the project was related to oil or the search for geothermal energy, indeed, since the heat emanating from the core of Today the Earth is a source within reach of few countries, such as Iceland, which due to its volcanic activity has high temperatures at almost superficial levels of the subsoil. For the rest, however, reaching the 150ºC necessary to drive electric turbines is not so easy.
To understand the well of the USSR, we must place the experiment in the years of the Cold War, times in which the space race between the Kremlin and the United States extended to any mark that could be reached in the field of science. When it comes to exploring the depths of the Earth, both powers began to organize their experiments in the 1950s, with the aim of reaching the Mohorovicic discontinuity, the limit between the Earth’s crust and mantle.
Well cover, abandoned and sealed
The accident
The United States took the lead in 1958 with the launch of Project Mohole. Located near the city of Guadalupe, in Mexico, the operation was carried out by a team of engineers who drilled, through the bed of the Pacific Ocean, a hole with a depth of more than 180 meters. Those responsible had considered that it was not viable on the surface of the Earth, while in the open sea it was more feasible, for the simple reason that the mantle was much closer to the seabed. However, it was canceled in 1966 due to its high cost.
It was then the turn of the USSR, which got to work in 1970 with the 15,000 meters on the horizon. At first they used Uralmash-4E drills, and later Uralmash-15000. Several wells were opened starting from a central branch, SG-3 being the deepest of all. Nine years after work began, on June 6, 1979, the depth record, which was held by the Bertha Rogers well, in Washita County, United States, was broken at 9,583 meters.
Four years later, in 1983, the depth was exceeded at 12,000 meters. At that moment they stopped digging for a year so that several specialists and authorized personnel could visit that fascinating place. They resumed it in 1984, but at a much slower pace. However, on September 27, 1985, when they reached 12,066 meters, a terrible accident occurred in which part of the well collapsed and 5,000 meters of earth were filled in. That was a great disappointment, because they would have to drill again from 7,000 meters deep. Once again they had to accelerate and, in 1989, they reached 12,262.
15.000 metros
The optimism of those responsible skyrocketed. They were convinced that they would reach 13,500 meters in the late 1990s and 15,000 meters in 1993, but as the drill headed towards the center of the Earth and reached that record depth, a completely unexpected change occurred. During the first 3,000 meters, temperatures inside the well had risen to about what the researchers expected, but then the heat level shot up much faster. As the drilling began to approach the initial target, the hole had heated up to 185°C, twice what they had anticipated.
That wasn’t all. The researchers also discovered that the rock at those depths was much less dense than they had imagined, causing a mass of mud and hydrogen to continually flow that seemed impossible to work on. As a result of these temperatures, the material found reacted in strange and unpredictable ways. Those responsible came to the conclusion that the team would not last in these conditions, so they decided to paralyze it shortly before the fall of the USSR. They closed it definitively in 1995. The hole remains sealed today, with no one having managed to surpass that mark.
Despite this, researchers were able to learn some fascinating things before sealing the ‘Kola Superdeep Well’. For example, at about 6,400 meters deep there were tiny fossils of marine plants. These plant treasures were completely intact from the time they had spent locked under several kilometers of rock. It is believed that they were more than two billion years old.
There was, even, a more impressive find in the farthest reaches of the hole. By measuring seismic waves, experts had previously predicted that the rock beneath our feet changes from granite to basalt about 3 to 6 kilometers below the surface, but they found that this was not the case, at least on the Kola Peninsula. They only found granite, even at the deepest point of the well. They eventually discovered water flowing several kilometers underground, at depths where no one predicted it could exist. Although some of the most fanciful theories have suggested that this discovery is proof of the biblical floods, it is believed that it is the result of a strong pressure that forces the oxygen and hydrogen atoms to come out of the rock, to later remain trapped in form of water below the surface.
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