A 100-year-old copper mine in the mountains near Salt Lake City, Utah hosts a pit that extends three quarters of a mile deep and spans 2.5 miles. There are a few reasons we humans dig deep into the Earth-extracting resources like fossil fuels and metals, for starters. But the hole in Kola remains the deepest. Humans have since dug longer boreholes, including the 12,289-meter borehole drilled in the Al Shaheen Oil Field in Qatar and the 12,345-meter offshore oil well near the Russian island of Sakhalin. Since the drilling was stopped in 1992, and the project site was abandoned around a decade later, the Kola Superdeep Borehole has maintained the record for the deepest artificial point on Earth. The Russian scientists in Kola described the rocks at those depths as behaving more like plastic than rock. The rocks themselves also become more malleable. Such high temperatures deform the drill bits and pipes. This was almost twice as hot as they’d predicted. At 7.5 miles below the surface, the 2.7 billion year old rocks there at temperatures of around 180 degrees Celsius (or a scorching 356 degrees Fahrenheit). But the scientists and engineers were forced to give up when they hit unexpectedly high temperatures.
The hole was intended to go “ as deep as possible,” which researches expected to be around 9 miles (that’s ~14,500 meters). Known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever dug reaches approximately 7.5 miles below the Earth’s surface (or 12,262 meters), a depth that took about 20 years to reach.* An internet search about the world’s deepest hole turns up the suggestion "Kola Superdeep Borehole screams." No wonder locals call it the well to hell.īefore the very idea of a superdeep hole starts haunting your dreams, keep this in mind-the hole is only nine inches in diameter (that’s about 23 centimeters). The deepest hole ever dug may be pretty unassuming, but I suspect I’m not alone in being a little freaked out by it. Sure, it’s covered and welded shut, but it still sounds like a horror film to me. A portal to the center of the earth sits among the ruins of an abandoned project site in Murmansk, Russia, not far from the Norwegian border.
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