What We Found When We Drilled To The Centre of The Earth

hey 42 here a quick warning before we begin this is a boring video no seriously it's all about boring but before we look downwards let's take a detour up towards space Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellites who ever successfully make it into orbit and it's launched by the Soviets in 1957 was one of the most significant achievements in the early space race on the one hand the space race was about Cold War rivals the US and the Soviet Union engaging in a bit of good old showing off in front of the rest of the world a classic case of my rock is bigger than your rocket but it was also seen as a vital to national security respond it's launched causing the bigwigs in Washington to start panicking that they'd fallen behind the Soviets in technological prowess but we all know how the story went from there just over 10 years later in 1969 the US came out on top when the Apollo 11 crew made the 240,000 mile journey to our nearest neighbor and Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon oh yeah and he botched arguably the most famous line in all of human history in the process it's one step for a man Neil Howe well maybe next time the space race captured the attention of the world was some 600 million people watching the landing live on television but whilst 20% of mankind had their attention trained on the heavens there was another kind of race taking place this one heading in exactly the opposite action because whilst the US and the USSR weren't busy strapping their citizens to rockets and blessing them into space getting involved in proxy wars or testing ever more cataclysmic nuclear weapons they were of all things preoccupied with attempting to find out who could take the deepest hole now that might sound like more the kind of behavior befitting to board kids on the beach rather than two of the world's biggest superpowers but I can assure you it's true the ultimate aim apart from yet another round of metaphorical dick measuring was to become the first nation in history to drill down through the earth top layer the crust and into the mantle below this raised to the center of the earth is much less famous than the space race astronauts cosmonauts and the endless reaches of space are just that much cooler than very deep holes and a bunch of rocks I guess and Bruce Willis wouldn't come along to make drilling sexy again until 1998 when Armageddon was released but in many ways the quest to reach the Earth's mantle was more of a journey into the unknown than the one taken by Neil and the gang on Apollo 11 because believe it or not whilst Humanity was busy pushing back the boundaries of space and developing ever more advanced technology we still were surprisingly ignorant as to what was going on down here on earth right beneath our feet it wouldn't be until almost 10 years after Sputnik Warren made it into orbits that's the theory of plate tectonics would finally be agreed upon for example this unifying theory was absolutely vital to our understanding of the geological processes that shaped the earth without it scientists were divided as to what exactly caused earthquakes and volcanoes and though they recognize how the coastlines of South America and Africa were a suspiciously snug fit nobody was quite sure what mechanism could have split them apart and while scientists had come up with some ingenious ways to better understand the calm of the earth despite only ever having scratched its surface they were fully aware that without hard evidence their theories were just that theories the US and USSR took two very different approaches to the challenge of drilling down into the mantle the Soviets found the nice barren stretch of land on the Kola Peninsula to start digging whilst the Americans decided to take a crafty shortcut by drilling offshore where the Earth's crust is significantly thinner around five to six kilometers deep versus 30 to 40 beneath the continents the u.s. quest to reach the mantle was named project mo Hall after Croatian seismologist and Ouija maharaja vic who discovered the boundary between the crust and the mantle in 1909 through clever observation of seismic waves the project began in 1960 of guadalupe of mexico amid swirling rumors of a similar project being undertaken by the soviets remember this was just three years after the USSR had got him one over on their arch-rivals with the launch of Sputnik 1 and the Americans were nervous of being second-best once again project mogul was led by the curiously named miscellaneous society an eccentric bunch of rather brilliant scientists known for awarding their members a genuine stuffed albatross as an award for significant achievements their motto was illegitimate non carborundum a mock Latin aphorism which roughly translates as don't let the bastards grind you down yes it was these guys the Americans chose to go up against the might of the USSR picture Rocky Balboa versus Ivan Drago in rocky 4 only replaced rocky with a quaint old professor wearing a monocle and carrying a stuffed albatross on the one arm spoiler alert professor Balboa is going to get seven shades of [ __ ] kicked out of him in this one kids at least he could use his albatross to block punches instead of his face although the Americans have cleverly sidestepped the need to drill through the first 25 kilometers or so of crust by starting on the ocean floor they did have one problem deepwater ocean drilling hadn't been invented yet and unsurprisingly drilling of every deep hole in the ocean floor whilst bobbing around in a constantly moving ship isn't exactly a walk in the park but if there's one thing oddball academics are good at its overcoming complex technical challenges thanks to their invention of dynamic positioning computer controlled system not automatically maintains a ship's position using a series of interconnected frosters the project got off to a great start led by the multi-talented Willard Bascom it was an engineer adventurer scientists writer photographer painter miner cinematographer and archaeologist phase 1 testing resulted in the first successful untethered deepwater drilling ever completed give that man an albatross maybe just a small one though because of the five holes drilled the deepest was only 183 metres but the important thing was they'd proven it was possible oh and I forgot to mention to make this strange project that little bit stranger legendary author John Steinbeck just happened to be along for the ride taking some time off between writing the winter of our discontent and winning himself a Nobel Prize for Literature John an amateur oceanographer in his spare time was on board reporting on the project for a special feature in Life Magazine despite its early success things soon took a turn for the worse her project Mohall you'd have thought that someone might have picked up on this a little sooner but it turns out drilling down to the mantle is a pricey business and funding was caught not long after the completion of phase 1 when the guys holding the purse strings heard just how much phase 2 is going to cost this came along with the usual helping of political scheming academic infighting in general bickerings offered by all great projects meaning phase 2 never got off the ground or for that matter under it yes project Mohall eventually went the way of Lennie in Of Mice and Men and was sadly terminated its profile having being raised by Steinbeck's popular report project mal halt became something of a national joke in the following months with Newsweek magazine dubbing the failed expedition project no hull very good the russians meanwhile took a little while longer to get their act together despite those rumours over in the US around the time mole hole was being set up it wasn't until 1970 that the soviet project actually got going it was worth the wait the soviet borehole was just nine inches thick but don't believe the rumors girth isn't everything because those soviets they went deep real deep just how deep i hear you ask put it this way if i was to ask you what the deepest point on earth is there's a decent chance you'd say the Mariana Trench the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean if you're a real smartass you might even go with the challenger deep the very deepest part of the Mariana Trench which is a dizzying ten thousand nine hundred meters down but as I'm sure you've guessed by now you'd be wrong on both counts because the deepest known place on earth to this day lies at the bottom of a hole dug by the Russians in order to get one over on the Americans during the Cold War known as the Kola super-deep borehole presumably named by an imagination elite challenged Soviet due to its location on the Kola Peninsula and the fact that it is like super deep man this particular hole goes down a frankly ridiculous 12.2 kilometers to make a feeble attempt at putting that number into some kind of context the Kola super-deep borehole is deeper than Mount Everest is tall it's deeper even in the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747 and if you were to somehow fall into it for which you would need to have one hell of a narrow waistline would take you around for four minutes our free fall before you hit the bottom very very hard as an interesting aside in his book do colors exist mathematicians safe standard Cottrell calculated how long it would take to fall all the way through the earth if such a thing were possible for a very long tube in a vacuum his conclusion 42 minutes despite the incredible depth the Soviets reached they didn't get anywhere near the mantle as intended making it only about 30 percent of the way through at a certain depth the temperatures had begun to increase much more sharply than had been predicted up to about a hundred and eighty degrees at the bottom of the ball it was too much for their equipment to handle and they were forced to call it a day drilling ceased in 1990 and the site was abandoned entirely but many of the buildings now derelict can still be found there today on the super-deep borehole itself it's just sitting there it's covered by a fairly hefty looking methyl lid admittedly but below that lid is a 12 kilometre drop all the way down adventure tourists are known to visit the site regularly now maybe it's just me that's something kind of creepy about to hole this deep and perhaps that's why rumors have circulated over the years that the Soviet scientists like a bunch of irresponsible Dwarfs from middle-earth delved too greedily and too deep but instead of pissing off a Balrog these scientists are said to have unexpectedly broken through into a colossal cavern curious they then lowered a heat-resistant microphone inside to see just what was going on down there when they came to play about the tape on the surface they heard the screams of the damned pass right instead of finding the mantle the Soviets are said to have drilled straight down through the ceiling of hell I bet Satan was pissed when he found out is notoriously difficult to find a good roofer twelve point twelve kilometers below the surface of the earth okay so this conspiracy theory is obviously utter [ __ ] but that didn't stop several news outlets from reporting this story at the time seriously Trinity Broadcasting Network the largest Christian television network in the world actually ran the story in 1989 titling it scientists discover hell what the scientists did discover wasn't quite as exciting as the fiery Inferno of the underworld but we're still quite important scientifically they found liquid water much further down than had previously been fought possible as well as microscopic plankton fossils 6.8 kilometers below the surface but of course the most important discovery was that yes the Soviets could indeed dig a deeper hole than the Americans and therefore most likely did have larger penises so whilst the u.s. may have won the space race it was the Soviets you got furthest in the race to the center of the earth though neither side ever did manage to cross the finish line thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video then please consider supporting me on patreon because it really helped me to continue to make them all so you can get your hands on a first edition signed copy of my new book stick if liking it by heading on over to unbound publishing you'll find a link in the description I'm pre-ordering your copy today thank you

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Keywords: space race, hole, deepest hole, deepest hole in the world, deepest hole on earth, soviets, cold war, the space race, nasa, history, sputnik, kola, kola superdeep borehole, boring, borehole, soviet union, the cold war, deep hole, deepest holes, kola borehole, big hole, russia, ussr, world's deepest hole, deepest holes on earth

Id: hKW2ONkdGbA

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020