30 years ago scientists could dig to a depth of 12,226 meters

“Higher and higher and higher we strive for the flight of our birds” – they sang in the 20s. The space-age popular Airman’s March has been replaced by the dreamy “And apple trees will bloom on Mars…”.

Yes, a person knows no bounds in his desire to know the unknown and therefore others are curious to look into the depths of the earth when some aspire upwards and know the universe. These people are called surveyors. So here, too, there was a peaceful rivalry between the countries for many years: who can look deeper?

Kola SG-3 (superdeep) is the deepest borehole that surveyors have been able to drill to date, as its name suggests, on the Kola Peninsula, and its depth is a record-breaking 12 km 262 meters.

Why Kolsky? The age of the rocks there is estimated at 3 billion years. Of course, the samples that scientists brought there during drilling were of great scientific interest.

It was not difficult to drill granite rock, but after 7 km we softened a lot, the drill jammed, it broke off, we had to move to the side to continue drilling. As a result, the deviation from the original mouth at the maximum depth reached was not less than 840 meters.

The work was made even more difficult by the fact that as the depth of the borehole increased, the temperature in it increased and at the depth reached in 1994 it was 220°C. More heat-resistant equipment and enormous funds were required.

Almost 30 years have passed since work on the SG-3 stopped. No wonder that this experiment, which lasted almost a quarter of a century, is the subject of more and more conjectures, each more absurd than the last.

The beginning was laid by the American tabloids in the 80’s as the work continued. It was believed that human groans and screams could be heard from the thickness of the rocks as if from the underworld, and the well itself was dubbed the “road to hell”.
So, today on the Internet you can find assurances that Soviet surveyors wanted to get to the mantle, but, afraid of the screams they heard, stopped work and mothballed the well.

Such speculations can occur only to the ignorant. To study the acoustics of the depths reached, seismic receivers were used in those years, and there were simply no microphones capable of withstanding such temperatures.

As for the mantle, even today, with the development of modern technologies, it is clear that not only the mantle, but even the middle of the earth’s crust is not yet accessible. And the depth reached by native drillers, which is barely a third of the thickness of the crust, is still a record, and only thanks to their unprecedented endurance over many years.

By the way: Anyone who doubts that there are no screams from the underworld in the thick crust of the earth and cannot be, can take an excursion to the German oil rig. When reaching a depth of 9101 m, due to the too high cost of further work, more heat-resistant equipment was needed, which was mothballed a year later than the domestic one – in 1995.

But the well continues to be maintained, various sensors are periodically lowered to its bottom so that its visitors can hear the sounds of the earth from a depth of 9 km.

As you can see, it is not the screams from the underworld, but the elementary high costs of such projects that prevent further exploration of the depths of the earth. And here even the industrialized countries cannot cope on their own. That is why in 2013 the EU countries, Japan, the USA, China, Australia, Brazil and New Zealand pooled their strengths and finances.

A long-term program of the International Ocean Discovery Program has been developed and is being implemented to study the processes occurring in the Earth’s thickness.

Source: lemurov.net

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