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Büyük Kanyon, Grand Canyon, United States Photo by Omer Nezih Gerek on Unsplash
Digging deeper
I got curious about how deep the deepest hole ever dug was and stumbled into a Cold War competition I never knew about — the race to the center of the Earth!
A Dig Towards the Core of the Earth Uncovers a Lot of Scientific Secrets
The ambitious goal to dig towards the center of the earth started with a competition between the USA and the USSR to conquer the subterranean world. We all know the space race between the two nations to conquer outer space but little was known about another race to dig as far into the Earth’s crust as they possibly could.
And when it comes to digging holes, no one could out dig the USSR!1
Actually, the US took an early lead, starting with Project Mohole in 1957. American engineers drilled 601 feet into the bed of the Pacific Ocean off Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Starting at the bottom of the ocean seems like a cheat. In any event, Congress cut off funding after eight years.
The Soviets then entered the fray in 1970 with the Kola Superdeep Borehole project on the Kola Peninsula in the extreme northeast of Russia (up by Finland). By 1989 the Soviet engineers had reached a depth of 40,230 ft or more than 7.6 miles — far short of the Earth’s core, or even the mantle. But far deeper than 601 feet.
So did the Soviet Union win the drilling race?
Well, the Soviets did dig themselves into the deepest hole, with the USSR collapsing in 1991.2
But, yes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is still the deepest human-made hole on Earth as of 2023. And it did produce a number of important geological findings that you can learn more about in the linked articles below. My interest today is mainly that there was a Cold War hole-digging competition, because of course there was!
Your guide to the inner world. Or at least to the cover story for the Hollow Earth full of dinosaurs and UFOs that we all know is really down there! Earth’s interior. Right- crust, mantle, and outer and inner core to scale. Left- Cutaway showing continental and ocean crust, and upper mantle layers. The lithosphere is the crust plus the uppermost layer of the mantle. Source: Karla Panchuk (2018) CC BY 4.0. Earth photo by NASA (n.d.) Public Domain view source
Drilling at the Kola Superdeep Borehole ended in 1995 due to budget cuts — that whole “collapse of the Soviet Union” thing happened in 1991 — and today the site is a Russian tourist attraction.
I’m not kidding.
Welcome to the Kola Superdeep Borehole! Enjoy your visit! Source: WIKIMEDIA/(CC BY-SA 4.0) via HowStuffWorks
If you're curious, learn more about really deep holes3 here:
The Deepest Hole in the World: “Have you ever thought about what it takes to drill to the centre of the Earth?”
A Decades-Long Quest to Drill Into Earth’s Mantle May Soon Hit Pay Dirt: Geologists have had to contend with bad luck, budget cuts and the race to the moon in their efforts to drill deep into our planet
Why Did the Russians Seal Up the Kola Superdeep Borehole?:
One effort to drill to Earth's mantle is being conducted by a group of international researchers working with Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. The agency's drilling ship Chikyu, currently located off the coast of East Asia, is equipped to drill through 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ocean water and 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) of crust to reach the mantle.4
Or get the real story from Jules Verne. Illustration by by Édouard Riou from the novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) Source: Public domain.
Still life in a cave
Speaking of holes in the ground…
A year and half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people…
No, no, I’m interested. Please continue.
A year and half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged with a cheerful grin and said she thought she had more time to finish her book.
I can relate, Beatriz.
She had almost no contact with the outside world during her impressive feat of human endurance. For 500 days, she documented her experiences to help scientists understand the effects of extreme isolation.
One of the first things that became apparent on April 12 2023 when she emerged from the cave was how fluid time is, shaped more by your personality traits and the people around you than a ticking clock.
When talking to reporters about her experiences, Flamini explained she rapidly lost her sense of time. The loss of time was so profound that, when her support team came to retrieve her, she was surprised that her time was up, instead believing she had only been there for 160-170 days.
I sometimes lose track of what day it is. I always remember Thursday, of course! But Tuesday can be quite slippery. I once spent almost an entire Wednesday thinking it was Tuesday, because the actual Tuesday somehow got by me. So I can believe that awareness of the passage of time is highly subjective. Time flies when you’re having fun, right? And a watched pot never boils — I’ve tried.5
Back to the cave…
Our actions, emotions and changes in our environment can have powerful effects on the way in which our minds process time.
For most people, the rising and setting of the sun mark the passing of days, and work and social routines mark the passing of hours. In the darkness of an underground cave, without the company of others, many signals of passing of time will have disappeared.
Makes sense. Unless underground dwelling cannibals find you. Then you’ll know what time it is.
One way in which we keep track of the passage of time is memory. If we don’t know how long we have been doing something for, we use the number of memories formed during the event as an index to the amount of time that has passed. The more memories we form in an event or era, the longer we perceive it to have lasted.
Busy days and weeks filled with lots of novel and exciting events are typically remembered as longer than more monotonous ones where nothing noteworthy happens.
And yet vacations seem to fly by, while 2020, when so many people were forced to do so little, seemed to last forever.
Full article here: Woman spends 500 days alone in a cave – how extreme isolation can alter your sense of time
More about Beatriz’s cave adventure: A Woman Just Emerged After Spending 500 Days Alone in a Cave. She Saw Some Things.
Flamini, 50, entered the cave in Granada—northeast of Malaga—on Nov. 21, 2021. She didn't get any updates about the world since the time she descended, and had instructed the team not to tell her of anything, even a family emergency. Instead of interacting with others, she read books, exercised, drew, painted, and knitted woolly hats.
"I've been silent for a year-and-a-half, not talking to anyone but myself," she says, according to the BBC. "There was a moment when I had to stop counting the days."
Living the dream.
If you lived here, you’d already be home. Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
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Insert joke about Soviet economic system here.
And there’s the punchline.
According to NASA Solar System Exploration, the Earth's crust is the outermost layer and goes about **19 miles (30 kilometers) deep** on average on land. The mantle is the thickest layer and is about **1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) thick**. The outer core is about **1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) thick** and made of iron and nickel fluids. The inner core is in the solid-state whereas the outer core is in the liquid state and lies between the planet's silicate mantle and its liquid iron-nickel outer core.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/27/2023
Japan should know better than this. That’s how you wake up Godzilla…
It does help if you turn on the stove.