but already welcome back to another brand new episodes of mega-projects i as always I'm your host Simon today fascinating one we're looking at really deep holes I promise this more interesting than it sounds this is the Kola super-deep borehole basically a giant hole in the ground they dug in Russia let's just jump in [Music] the 20th century saw the Cold War battle for the stars as the USSR in the USA raced each other into space and eventually to the moon but there was another short-lived race that took place between the two superpowers they never quite captured the imagination in the same way a race this instead of going up when straight down almost entirely within the Arctic Circle the Kona Peninsula in northwestern Russia is a barren lands of mountains and tundra harsh environments that's beautiful yet bleak and it's homes one of the most extraordinary engineering feats of all time this was a scientific project which lasted 22 years and pushed the boundaries of both human achievements and our understanding of planet Earth but today all that remains is a small rusted metal plate seemingly bolted straight into the grounds beyond this metal cap though lies a vast chasm the deepest man-made hole in the world the Kola super-deep borehole and just having a look of the picture of this thing online before I was making this video it's just incredible what lies beyond this essentially abandoned metal plate in the middle of nowhere compared to space exploration you might find it harder to muster the same kind of enthusiasm about holes in the earth but what was dug at Kola remains an astonishing achievement and just nine inches in diameter is smaller than most standard pizzas but at a depth of 12 thousand 262 meters that's 40,000 230 feet it is unparalleled and bear in mind that kind of cruising altitude of planes is about 35,000 so this hole is deeper into the grounds than a plane flies in the sky let's put another way this hole travels 7.5 miles underground and yet still only equates to about 0.2% of the distance to the center of the planet so unlike that movie where they go through the center of the earth that I absolutely can't not remember the name of it they did a remake with Colin Farrell you're getting much more information that you probably need right now we're really a long way from that bear in mind this is the size of a pizza or remains of the cola deep ball area can be found 10 kilometres from the small town of Zappala Yanni just 20 kilometers from the Norwegian border during the heyday of the Soviet Union and after the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the area the population of this traditionally sparsely populated area absolutely booms but the 1990s they saw an economic crash and then I was collapsed rapidly today zeppeli Ani is a pretty grim place with its main claim to fame being that rusting heap nearby where there's a massive hole in the ground say Oh would you have us out giant hole okey doke but let's get back to the hole itself why was it done well almost entirely in the name of science Soviet planners have hoped to drill down 15,000 meters in order to learn more about the Earth's crust and the mantle beneath it considering that the mantle makes up about 75% of our planet structure our knowledge about it is primitive to say the least we know more about the surface of the Moon than what lies this far down in the earth there was also probably a sense of prestige and competition involved and beating the Americans or anything during the Cold War was always a bit of a cause for celebration and they're also right the other way of course while the subterranean genre of fiction had existed before the release of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864 really sparked an interest in what lies beneath us the tale involving a German professor and his nephew travelling through the earth via volcanic tubes and discovering prehistoric animals along the way may be a thrilling piece of fantasy but it certainly lodged deep in the imagination of many people now Before we jump in let's focus a little on the geology the outer skin gotta put my coffee down I need to just stick you late the outer skin of the earth is across this a section which varies in thickness depending on where you are but it's generally between three and forty three miles thick that's a lot of variation but considering how big the earth is it's still just this little crust round the outside now the lower limits of this slides the mejor ovitch discontinuity which is in effect the boundary between the crust and the mantle the mantle is different and mantle it's absolutely huge it's believed to be about 1,800 miles thick and it's made up of a combination of rocks minerals and gases including silicon iron magnesium aluminium and oxygen finally at the centre of the earth you probably know the answer this one if you seen a movie called the core lies the core we believe that's composed my that movie was really bad by the way we believe it's mostly composed of an iron nickel alloy with temperatures reaching somewhere in the region of five thousand four hundred and thirty degrees Celsius or nine thousand eight hundred and six degrees Fahrenheit which is interestingly around the same temperature as the surface of the Sun however almost all of this is just based around scientific theory rather than known fact because well no one's ever been there the initial goal of the Kola super-deep borehole was to drill down into Mahara vetch discontinuity to retrieve samples that would allow us to see this part of the planet for the first time spoiler alert den why ya [Music] while the space race captured the imaginations of millions of people around the world the alternative race Underground's never quite had the same impact and while it was the USSR that led the way into space it was the Americans who actually pioneered the earliest attempts underground interesting obviously switched around a bit later the idea of drilling a hole deep enough to take samples of the Mahara village discontinuity had emerged in the United States in the late 1950s and stunned by the success of the Soviet Sputnik satellite it was a first satellite into space I don't know if that's a mega project enough but I wonder if that could be good for this channel let me know in the comments below anyway the Americans they're pressing on drilling this hole because they were like the Russians are going up let's go down by 1961 a group of scientists known as the American miscellaneous society were ready most generic name of a society ever while the ball : be drilled on land project male would be undertaken at sea for the simple reason that the Earth's crust was thinner from the sea beds than it was from the same point on land indeed if you look at images of how deep the Kola super-deep borehole and the depth of the Mariana Trench and it's deeper the ball by the way it's not actually that much further from the bottom although I imagine drilling a hole at the bottom of the Mariana Trench would be somewhat challenging maybe James Cameron could be involved drilling began on an oil ship cuss one in March 1961 and it quickly became a success with multiple test bore holes being drilled the longest of which was 183 metres that's 601 feet however the project quickly ran into management issues and funding issues and in 1966 it was scrapped completely at a final cost of 57 million dollars the race was over before it even started things started much slower in the Soviet Union that would outlive the American venture by decades four years later in 1970 work began on the Kola super-deep borehole but as you can imagine this was a slow and laborious task those involved faced numerous challenges not least because the technology needed had to be invented as they went along a specific drill was designed where only the drill bit at the end of the shaft rotated while a lubricant comprised mostly of pressurized drilling mud was pumped down to it through a different drill in order to keep it cool and allow it to spin at 80 revolutions a minute while the drill Accola was slowly making its way down the record for the deepest man-made hole in the world was broken by the Americans in 1972 an oil exploratory hall known as Bertha Rodgers in Oklahoma reached a new record of nine thousand five hundred eighty three meters that's 31 thousand four hundred and forty one feet but it's rain was short-lived and on the 6th of June 1979 the Kohler borehole surpassed it like say what you want about the Cold War it did inspire some really cool technology and drilling and space racing that was pretty cool I mean the whole risk of getting wiped out by nuclear holocaust was you know bad but the science was cool one of the reasons that this project took so long was that the drilling was halted sporadically over the years it became a popular site for politicians to visit no doubt eager to bask in the glory of delivering a bloody nose to the Americans because they managed to dig a deeper hole well done however the reality was most of the stoppages were for scientific reasons of course drilling the hole was only part of the challenge Soviet scientists Weger to test the rock that the drill was moving through but this posed a really unique problem with enormous temperature and pressure difference between the bottom of the hole and the surface rocks would quite simply just turn to dust by the time they had been removed scientific instruments needed to be created that could measure the integrity of the rocks while safely inside the hole and this led to a bunch of startling discoveries now what are the earliest finds funnily enough was something that they didn't actually find geologists had long assumes that a transition from granite to basalt occurred somewhere between 3 & 6 kilometers down and air of transitions between the upper and lower crust known as the Conrad discontinuity however as the cone of Bohol reached deeper and deeper in never found this transition this serie had been based on seismic reflection surveys but what was found in Kola led many to speculate that in fact these reflections were being caused by metamorphic change in the rock mainly from the extreme heat and pressure rather than the being an actual change in the type of rock it had also been long assumed that the earth's crust so far down it could have possibly contained water because it was just so dense but mermen behold significant amounts of hot mineralized water was in fact found now perhaps the most significant finds was the biological activity that was discovered and this is always so cool I love it when you know there is just life everywhere you know you'll see in a minute how far down they go scientists found 24 different types of fossilized microscopic organisms in rocks that were thought to be over two billion years old these pale in comparison with the oldest found on earth at 3.7 billion years old but considering the temperature and pressure that they were found in it was a remarkable discovery even to this day scientists have struggled to explain why such fossils would be six thousand seven hundred meters at 22,000 feet below the surface that's like four miles down now just for a moment let's step away from science and towards the occult promise I know this is a channel about engineering but this is worth it because it's entertaining because the counter bore hole has been long associated with an urban myth that began circulating in the late 1980s the much retold story which either emanated from Norway or the USA tells of a group of Russian scientists and strolling down deep into the earth now familiar well after passing fourteen kilometers they punched through a large empty cavity below curious about what was inside they lowered a heatproof microphone down into the hole and eventually into the cavity the sounds coming through the crackling speaker were simply terrifying scientists realized that the cavity below was Hell itself with the tormented screams of the Damned drifting upwards this is like the weakest urban legend ever because it's like I feel like if we discovered hell that would be more of a news story the fact that the story was based in Siberia and not Cola hasn't stopped the obvious connections being made now of course we regard this as nothing more than an urban myth no other way to regard it to be honest but coincidentally shortly after the story emerged drilling ceased as Cola which only inflames the rumors that drilling stopped in an attempt to contain the underworld sure this scientists that like yeah we have to continue drilling at least for a couple of weeks or people are gonna think that it's because of that Rena thing and we discovered hell when drilling finally came to a stop in 1992 it was because of two significant factors one they had discovered held not really the Soviet Union basically collapsed and this sort of expensive project was no longer feasible but there was also another problem that had arisen at the borehole temperatures had soared 280 degrees Celsius 356 baron height at the bottom of the hole almost double what had been expected had the not been political upheaval in Russia at the time it's unlikely anyway that the machinery being used would have been able to push down much further geologists at the time commented that the rock that far down behaves more like plastic or some sort of thick soup rather than rock but this wasn't quite the ends though no further drilling took place the laboratory at curly remained open for a number of years with help of international funding but in 2008 the site was finally abandoned and the borehole was covered questions have been asked ever since as to whether we could go further Germans running project reached a depth of 9,000 101 meters by the time it ceased in 1995 while the Japanese drilling ship chikyuu which was launched in 2002 with a mandate to explore the Manzel in the hope that they may understand earthquakes has been steadily increasing its drilling depth but has also faced enormous problems huge strides have been made especially with ocean drilling but the mantle and Coda's record still stands a long way off the race it seems is still very much on today what was once a glorious venture has come to a rather inglorious ending the site of the Kola super-deep borehole lies in ruin with many of the buildings now collapsed there are make science or plaques that tell of the historic achievement that occurred here the floor is just littered with jagged rusting metal but if you look closely you will find one small metal plate held firmly to the floor by 12 sturdy bolts and beneath it well it's a long way down and I just want to make a quick note this is the end of the video today I just wanted to note that I was researching into thumbnails and options for this video and there are so many terrible clickbait images of a giant hole outside of some town saying this is the deepest hole in the world the Kola super-deep borehole and the reality is it's just at the 12 inch thing and everything else is clickbait so please don't come at me saying like is not what it really looks like it looks like this it doesn't that's all just clickbait and I didn't do it for this video so it's probably not going to get as many views but here we are that just didn't feel right anyway this has been mega-projects I've been Simon thank you so much for watching I didn't even make it through all the way through my coffee but uh yes thank you for watching subscribe to this channel tell a friends thanks for watching [Music]
