SunstarTV Bureau: While scientists have spend decades trying to get closer as possible to the centre of the earth on a remote peninsula in Northwestern Russia, after discovering something unexpected happening, the researchers were forced to stop their experiment for good.
According to some experts believe, we are totally ignorant about what exists beneath the Earth’s surface. The United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, only a few people remember the equally fascinating battle to conquer the subterranean world. Beginning in the late 1950s, American and Soviet scientific teams started experiments in order to penetrate the centre of the Earth. The dense surface, which goes up to 50 kilometers into the centre of our planet, eventually gives way to a mysterious inner layer that makes up 40% of the Earth’s mass.
In 1958, the United States went ahead in the race and launched Project Mohole. Located near Guadalupe in Mexico, the operation involved a team of engineers drilling the Pacific Ocean floor, but eight years after it started its funding got cut off and the project was abandoned. In the end, Americans never reached the centre, but the Soviets also tried. In 1970, a team of researchers started drilling into the earth in the Pechengsky district, a sparsely populated region of Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Their goal was to try and get as close as possible to the centre.
But the Soviets were trying to reach a depth of about 49,000 feet below the Earth’s surface using specialized equipment. They started to dig a series of holes all branching off from a single main cavity. But while they were slowly getting there, the US also made progress of their own. In 1974, the Lone Star Producing Company started to drill for oil in Washita County, western Oklahoma. In the process, the company created the Bertha Rogers Hole, a man-made wonder that reached more than 31,400 feet, or nearly six miles, below the earth’s surface.
Although Lone Star did not find what they were looking for, it remained the deepest hole on the planet for another five years. Then in 1979, one of Kola’s holes, christened SG-3, smashed the record and by 1983, the hole, which was nine inches wide, also went down an impressive 39,000 feet into the Earth. Once this milestone was reached, researchers on the Kola Peninsula stopped working on the hole for 12 months so that people could visit the fascinating site. However, when they went back to work the following year, a technical problem forced them to stop drilling.
Reluctant to accept their defeat, the researchers abandoned the drilling and started again from a depth of 23,000 feet. By 1989, it had reached a record 40,230 feet and an incredible 7.5 miles. Optimistic about the future, they all believed that it would reach 44,000 ft by the end of 1990. Impressively, predictions even said it could reach its target of 49,000 ft as early as 1993, but something unexpected was lurking in the remote Russian tundra. Strangely, as the hole got closer and closer to the centre of the Earth, something completely unexpected happened and changed everything.
For the first 3,000 meters, temperatures inside the hole were more or less in line with what the researchers expected to find. But after that, the heat levels increased a lot faster. And by the time they got close to the target, the hole had heated up to a whopping 180 C (356 F), about 80 C (176 F) more than expected. But that’s not all. The researchers also discovered that the rock at those depths was less dense than they imagined which led to these high temperatures. They knew that their equipment would not last in those conditions so the team abandoned the project. At that time, it had been 22 years since they started drilling.
Researchers were able to learn fascinating things before the project stopped. For instance, at a depth of about six kilometers, they discovered small marine plant fossils. These were in great condition considering how long they had been locked under rock that was probably more than two billion years old. However, they made an even more exciting discovery. Measuring seismic waves, experts previously established that the rock beneath our feet changes from granite to basalt every three to four kilometers below the surface. But the team discovered that this was not the case.
The researchers found only granite, even at the deepest point in the hole, which led them to think that the change in seismic waves was the result of metamorphic differences in the rock. But that wasn’t all either. They also discovered flowing water several kilometers beneath the Earth, at depths where no one thought it could exist. But if some are very enthusiastic about subway water as it could prove biblical floods, it seems to be the result of strong pressure forcing oxygen and hydrogen atoms out of the rock. The impermeable rocks then trap the newly formed water beneath the surface.
At the time of the closure, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and in 1995 the project was abandoned. Today, the site is listed as an environmental hazard, although visitors can still see some of it in the nearby town of Zapolyarny, about ten kilometers away. And they still hold the record, the hole remaining the deepest man-made point on the planet. However, the race isn’t over yet. In the world’s oceans, the International Ocean Discovery Program is still drilling into the seafloor, fighting faulty equipment and extreme temperatures to discover secrets beneath the surface.
