July 7, 2026 • 46 mins
During the Cold War all eyes were on the Space Race between the US and USSR. But there was another, overlooked race too and it went in the opposite direction.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's
here two and Jerry's here too. Because this one's so exciting.
Jerry said, I wouldn't miss this one for the world,
and this is stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
You should know unless I had some minor appointment or
meeting that I could easily move.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
It's so great that Jerry just doesn't talk on this
because we can see whatever we want and we can't
hear what she's saying in response.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, it would be fun as if we were doing
our fun poking at Jerry sometimes and she just cut
in and said, cope yourself, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Right, I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Maybe we can beat that out. That'd be fun.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We'll see. But yes, she's excited about this one. And
she even said it's not going to be boring, or
is it? And we said, Jerry, pipe down boring.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Wasn't that a Simpson s thing?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Boring? I don't know. It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, I feel like Reverend love Joy did that in
a sermon one time that led them into like a
flashback or something very distant memory.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It sounds like you're talking about the Mister Sparkle episode
where Marge becomes the listen lady at church and Reverend
Lovejoy's completely lost like his I guess pastoral sense. And
the flashback you're talking about is when he traces it
back to the first time he met ned Flanders who
(01:37):
came to him for advice because he'd just done the
bump and his rear end touched the rear end of
another young man and he was up in arms about it.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
And maybe he was saying boring because it was a
ned Flanders flashback. It's possible somebody will know this one.
I'm pretty sure it was Lovejoy though.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Okay, well it didn't, Yeah, it didn't. We should have
said that in unison.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Have been great.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
We're talking today not about the Simpsons, although we just
have and that's great. We're talking today about a different
kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the
United States. Got a lot less press, way less press.
It got a lot less money and funding and you know,
attension and technology and engineers and brains thrown at it.
(02:25):
But I also wonder, Chuck, if we downplay it because
the USSR beat US so soundly at this particular race.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Maybe, yeah, that's possible, because you know, of course, we're
not talking about going to outer space. We're talking about
boring deep into the Earth and digging a deep hole.
And we're going to talk about that now in the
form of the Cola Borhole KOLA. And this started in
the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yes, well, yes, I think the idea started in the sixties,
but they started drilling in the seventh nineteen. But let's
not get ahead of ourselves, because the Soviets were actually
following the American lead. America made the first shot over
the Soviets bow by drilling into the undearth the vow first. Yeah,
(03:14):
I think him. They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
That's right. In nineteen fifty eight, we launched something called
Project Mohole, and this is like, hey, let's dig down
to the mantle. Let's get a sample off of Guadalupe Island,
Like let's go through the ocean floor, because the ocean's
already deep, so let's just go ahead and start down there.
And the name Project Mohole is a bit of a
(03:42):
science sciencey nerdy joke that plays on the Moho discontinuity
or discontinuity. How would you say?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The second one?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Second one, and that is the the Moho discontinuity. Is
the region worthy crust and the mantle meet up and
say hello, right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And they were, I mean this is theoretical. We should say.
It's named after a guy named a I think it's
Mohorovicic of Croatia, who back in nineteen oh nine, nineteen
oh nine, mind you, was studying seismic waves from earthquakes
so closely that he realized that at some point in
(04:24):
the Earth's crust they actually like speed up, they hit
some literal inflection point, and he was like, there's some
sort of boundary there, maybe even a discontinuity, as chuckle
later say, and he well, it became I don't think
he named it after himself, but it became called the
Moho discontinuity. Like you said, it was hypothetical as theoretical,
(04:46):
but one reason they named it that is because ultimately
the goal was to drill right through the crust into
the mantle. That's the money lithosphere.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, for sure. And you know what, nothing turns me
on more than scientifically speaking, then early science where they
someone got it right, you know what I mean? Yeah,
Like it's fun to talk about blood letting and stuff
like that. But I love it when somebody, like way
before they know about this stuff, has an idea and
(05:18):
it kind of bears out to be correct. I just
love that stuff. So hats off to you Croatian scientist
whose name I'm not going to.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Try if blood lighting is wrong, I don't want to
be right, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
I also want to give a shout out to the
group of scientists, the informal drinking group called the American
Miscellaneous Society or AMSOCK.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, they seem fun, huh.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
They came up with this idea in the fifties, and
it was one of many ideas that they had, most
of which were just totally ridiculous in outlandish, like towing
icebergs to California to use for irrigation. This one actually
had legs, and it got funding from the National Science Association,
and they got to drilling, like you said in Guadaloupe,
and they it actually got funding from the National Academy
(06:05):
of Sciences and they started drilling, and well, I guess
what the Gulf of the Pacific, Oh God is Mexico
and island.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Your desire for specificity gets you in so much trouble.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Okay, well, at any rate, just they started drilling. Yeah, wow,
that felt really good. I've never tried that before. Huh.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, vagary is my secret weapon.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Okay, thanks for letting me in on it. I think
I've just turned over a new leaf.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, they got that funding. They made it down about
just over six hundred feet, which is not too bad. This,
to me is one of the more fun facts of
the whole episode. Like this, John Steinbeck, the author went
along to document it. Mm hmm, Like who should we get?
I don't know. Steinbeck's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
That's where he got the idea for the end of
Mice and Men. There was a one of the engineers
accidentally dropped a sample, a very precious sample. Yeah, and
rather than let the rest of the crew kill the
guy in a terrible fashion, he stuck up behind him
and took his life.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
That's good. Wait with Steinbeck the Pearl.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Is that what his nickname was, the Pearl?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Or did he write the Pearl? Because that was about
pearl diving, So I'm pretty sure that was Steinbeck. So
he may obviously had some sort of interest in going
under the sea.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
He did. Actually, it's funny you say that because he
was a I think a trained marine biologist, or he
was planning on going into marine biology and never really
lost his love of it.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, pretty cool, so awesome project. They pulled the plug
in nineteen sixty six, or I guess rather they stuck
in the plug in nineteen sixty six when the US
House representative said no more, no more drilling. And then
four years later the Soviets set off to do a
deep drilling attempt when they drilled into the earth in Mirmansk, Russia,
(08:02):
just near the Norwegian border, near the Barren See. And
this is it. This is the Cola Super Deep Borehole
aka the deepest hole ever dug by human beings.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, still to this day. Yeah. And it's named Cola
because it's on the Cola Peninsula. Kola, did you spell it?
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I love it. It's worth spelling again and another time, Kola.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It's like a Cola nut exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
The thing is, Chuck is for as stupendous an achievement
as this is. And if you're a geologist, if you're
an earth scientist basically of any sort, this is a
stupendous achievement that they carried out in Soviet Russia in
the seventies and eighties. It's just been completely like left
to rod. Did you see those pictures of it now?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I mean you walk right past the thing and
not even though it's there.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Right, And the the reason why you could walk right
past is because it's the whole The hole I was
going to say, the whole hole, which makes sense, is
only like nine inches in diameter. I think that's twenty
three centimeters, yeah, twenty three centimeters right.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, It's like I went caving that time, and instead
of walking into a big rocky cave, I like crawled
into a small hole in the ground. I know, but
that's the same deal. Like nine inches is very small.
It has got a plate secured over it with some
old rusty bolts, and I think you found out they
even etched on top of what it was, but they
(09:34):
got the number wrong, right.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah. As we'll see, the Coola super deep borehole got
all the way down to twelve thou two hundred and
sixty two meters into the Earth's crust, and we'll tell
you about just how deep that it will put in
perspective in a second. But when they put the when
they wrote down how deep it was, they transposed the
last two numbers, so they shorted it by thirty four
(10:00):
thirty eight meters maybe something around that.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, and you might be disappointed to know if you
like took some took a ranch out there, and you're like,
I got to drop a rock in that thing just
to see if I can hear anything, and took that
plate off. Let's say you were able to, you wouldn't
be able to drop anything in it, just because of
the Earth's movement over time. It is no longer like,
at least at that point, like a continuous hole. It's
(10:26):
kind of shifted and fulled and kind of caved in
in places, and it is full of gunk.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It is. And legend has it that if you had
recorded the movements of the Earth over that time span
and played it back at fast speed, you would hear
the Earth going as it subsided the deepest hole in
the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
The status of Trombones exactly, all right, So you promised
talk about how deep this thing was, and in true
stuff you should know fashion. We're gonna have several examples,
none of which Big Max surprisingly no.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
But there is a Domino's pizza reference in there.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
I was hoping not to not mention that.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
No, it's that specificity thing I have running through. I'm
just gonna say it. The diameter the hole is about
as big around as a small pizza from Dominoes there.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
That's right. I think people are suspicious of all of
our brand mentioned, so I was trying to avoid those.
Oh really, yeah, come on people, Hey, you know that's
the thing. So this thing is deep, deep, deep. It
is about seven point six miles deep, about twelve thousand,
two hundred and sixty two meters or two hundred and
thirty feet deep. Like we said, the deepest hole ever.
(11:38):
It is lower than it's deeper than the lowest point
of the Mariana Trench. That's a pretty fun one. Sure
got a height perspective.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Height wise, it's it's deeper than the highest point on
Earth is tall, Mount Everest. In fact, it's so much
deeper than Mountain eversus is tall you could put Mount
Fuji on top of Mount ever and the Cola Borhole
would still be deeper than those two sacked on top
of one another.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, So that's it. That's a deep thing. Everybody.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, wait a minute, Wait a minute, there's one more
that knocks my socks off. Can I say it?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
It's probably the one I scribbled through. So yes, let's
hear it.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It is deeper than the height of the average cruising
altitude of a commercial airliner, specifically Delta Airlines.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yep, I scratched right through that thing. I was like,
we don't need that many examples. I love to take
that one, all right. So this went down into the
outermost layer of the Earth, which is continental crust, that
is like what we're standing on right now. They wanted
to reach the mantle with their technology. They thought they
could get down to nine point three miles, but only
(12:44):
made it seven point six.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That's right, yes, and nine point three mile sounds like
a really weird goal. But it turns out that they
were going for fifteen kilometers.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Yeah, but they thought that was I guess out of
reach if they figured nine point three was reasonable.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So yeah, and we will. There was an article I
found it was It's called Going Deep Excavation, Collaboration and
Imagination at the Cola Super Deep Borehole. It was written
by Charlotte Wriggley and published an Environment and Planning d
the Journal in twenty twenty three, and Charlotte Wrigglely points
out that the Cola Super Deep Borehole raised more questions
(13:24):
than answered them because one of the things they thought
is that this stuff was going to confirm all of
the predictions that Earth scientists had made over time, and
the fact that they thought they were going to get
down fifteen kilometers and the reasons that they didn't get
down that far. Basically, it's like a great example of
what the Cola Super Deep Borehole did, which was take
(13:46):
science and churn it up like a huge swath of
the Earth during an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, totally. Uh, that's maybe a good time for a break.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, let's do that, all right.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
We'll be right back everybody with more on this deep
deep hole.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So, Chuck, we should probably just do a quick primer
of eighth grader science, maybe of the layers of the Earth,
if you'll bear with me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
So you've got the outermost layer, the crust made up
of the continental crust, which is what we stand on,
and the oceanic crust, which is at the bottom of
the sea. Beneath that, you got the mantle and by
the way, the crust averages about twenty five miles or
forty kilometers thick. After that you got the mantle way thicker,
eighteen hundred miles thick. Then you hit the outer core.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
You hit the.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Inner core, which has a diameter of about twelve hundred
and thirty miles or nineteen hundred and eighty kilometers, which
happens to be about the distance from Topeka, Kansas to
Klondike Buff's Bluff's Utah.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Okay, you said that's the radius.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
That is No, that's the diameter, the full diameter of
the inner core. And then possibly there's also a super
liquid inner inner core that represents the centermost point of Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
That's right, and that's where Ronnie James Dio resides. Yeah,
I think.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So I've got to give an obligatory shout out to
the greatest tattoo ever. Oh okay, remember that one of
Dio on somebody's forearm.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
So for those of you who don't know what I'm
talking about, there's a tattoo out there of Ronnie Dio
making like the devil horns, but the perspective is done
in a way that it looks like Dio's arm turns
into the person with the tattoos, arm and fingers, so
they make the devil horns and it looks like Ronnie
Dio is. The perspective is just that amazing.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah. The only problem is it involves your armpit, right,
you know. Yeah, it's really kind of the worst part
of the body to me. The arm pit not a
fan to me.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
There's other parts that are grosser.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Like the butthole.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Sure, unless it's been recently.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Bleached between the dose. Oh my god, coming from the
guy who just said butthole, now I'm offended.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
I got that from Bruno. Remember the Sasha Baron Cohen movie. Bruno, Yeah,
you got what aintal bleaching?
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Oh? Is that first time you heard of that?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah? I hadn't heard of it before.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Okay, man, this is great episode. I mean we are
talking about super deepoles. So what we're trying to say is,
while it is impressive to go down seven point six miles,
that is like about a third of the Earth's crust alone.
So they were trying to get to the mantle and
that's just I mean, that doesn't seem like it's possible
(17:01):
that that could ever happen. R And it took years
and years to do. They started this project on May
twenty fourth, nineteen seventy and by nineteen seventy nine that
had broken all digging records. By nineteen eighty nine they
had reached that depth of forty two hundred and thirty feet,
which was kind of it. The project was opened for
(17:23):
a little while longer after that, but for reasons we
will go over soon you'll learn why. That was basically
about as deep as they could go. In nineteen eighty nine,
they were like, we can't get Kney deeper.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah. The one that it's like the reverse perspective that
gets me is that they dug point two percent of
the entire distance to the center point of the Earth. So,
like you said, it's impressive in some terms. In other terms,
it's just kind of a stupid hole, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, And you know there's if you're wondering, like why
would they even do this? What's down there? There's a
lot of reasons. There are a lot of deep holes
all over the world. Most of those are for like,
you know, mineral extraction or fossil fuel extraction or metals,
you know, ors things like that. There's the one hundred
year old Bingham Canyon Copper Mine and Salt Lake City. Yeah,
(18:10):
pretty great. Three quarters of a mile deep, but two
and a half miles across, So that is a snow
small pizza.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Now there's another one called the Big Hole. It's in
South Africa, belongs to the Kimberly Diamond Mine. It's one
of the largest holes in the world, with the caveat
of holes that were dug by human hands in no machinery,
which sounds pretty impressive unless you realize that you can
threaten to cut off those people's hands if they don't
use them to dig, then you can get it done.
(18:41):
And I'm quite sure that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, I did not even look into that, and I
just had great certainty that that was a completely exploitive experience.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Well, even if it's not true, we should be forgiven
because we're talking about South Africa diamond mines and giant
holes dug by hand. You can it's a pretty pretty
reasonable surmization.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah sermization, I don't know. I love it all right.
So that's one reason why you can dig down is
you know, for minerals and fossil heels and stuff like that.
But you can also just learn a lot about science,
and we did learn a lot about science through or
you know, the Soviets did, and we did through our
deep poles. But you know, like you mentioned earthquakes, obviously geohazards,
(19:25):
they ended up learning a lot about that stuff, and
we'll detail that a little bit. Geothermal heat and energy
is another big one. Oh, I don't know, maybe about
climate change and what's happened in the past that you
could find from digging deep, or maybe just like, hey,
we know a lot more about outer space than we
do about what's under our feet, so let's get down
there and see what we can learn.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, the place that they were digging so like we
usually dig ice cores to kind of get an idea
of climate change. Yeah, that's actually in the fairly recent past.
We're talking on the order of tens of hundreds of
thousands of years.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
The crust that they were digging into is pre Cambrian,
meaning that it came together and was formed from anywhere
between the origin of Earth to five hundred and thirty
eight million years ago, So it is super old. There's
a lot of secrets that could be unlocked just by
boring into it and looking at what comes up. Right,
(20:22):
So that's that's a good reason. Also, fossil fuels you
really can't look past. This is the seventies and eighties,
so they're One of the stated goals of the KSB
was to basically figure out new techniques for drilling super
deep oil wells, essentially because they said that it would
(20:44):
be a great benefit to mankind if we can learn
how to dig out fossil fuels that are deeper that
we can't currently reach.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, for sure, you know, I mentioned promise of earthquake talk.
They did just come up a lot lately again, but
they did learn about that stuff like if you go
really deep into the spot lines, you can detect, you know,
these tiny minute quakes that you don't even feel up
topside where we are. And you know, all of that
is usually about just learning how to get more accurate
(21:13):
predictions in the future. You know, they do like computer
simulations and stuff, but they need data input to do
those simulations right, and these holes give you great data
for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
They also have figured out how to use all of
that seismographic data to basically turn the resonance or the
way they resonate through Earth into images of inner Earth.
Itself fun and that really kind of I mean, you
can get if you're looking at mega colossal geology. There's
no reason I would say to dig anymore. Like if
(21:48):
we can do that kind of thing, I mean dig
to put you know, deeper and deeper seismographs, but not
to necessarily find out what inner Earth is like, because
we can image it like that in the same way
that if you have a watch one of those cool
archaeological shows on BBC, sometimes they'll have what looks like
a like a tamper, like a walk behind tamper, but
(22:10):
it has a shotgun shell that you put into it
and you show a shotgun shell. Yeah, it's like a
seismographic imager and it shows you what's you know, buried
beneath the ground in that field or whatever. This is
the same thing, except they're taking the data not from
the resonance from a shotgun shell, but from the resonance
of earthquakes in Earth and turning those into images.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah, and you know we also
want to just like pull stuff out of there and
see what it looks like, what's going on down there,
like what our deep deep crust looks like. When you
know they bring stuff out, it's generally pretty crumbly by
that point and kind of falls apart because of atmospheric
pressure changes and stuff like that. So you know, getting
(22:52):
those pictures of what things look like in their sort
of undisturbed state is beneficial, right.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And if you're like all these seems kind of flimsy,
holes are they're super deep. Holes are the greatest example
of humans curiosity just for the sake of knowing something new. Yeah,
then you'll find just about anywhere.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, don't stifle that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
People no get it the program.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So another question you might have is why did it
take so long? And why is it so hard to do?
And why aren't we able to just go deeper and
deeper and deeper? Like why they have to stop? Kind
of all those big questions, and it's you know, they
didn't realize until they got started. I don't think they
thought it was gonna be a cakewalk, but they didn't
realize until they really started digging down there that it's
(23:40):
not the easiest thing in the world to do and
there's a lot of complications that can arise. They didn't
at first. You found this YouTube site called half as
Interesting that we're talking about the drill bits, like they
did a great job through granted they have you know,
it's like a boring drill bit. It's like a you know,
like a windy cone with like teeth on the outside
of it, you know, to bore a hole. This kind
(24:02):
of stuff They used to like board subway tunnels and
you know, all kinds of tunnels through mountain, but in
this case they were going straight down. Those can only
work for about four hours until you need to replace
that bit, like the bit wears off and that's only
about thirty feet or so, depending on where you're digging
and how hard that rock is, and then you can't
just pop it off like a drill you get from
(24:23):
the hardware store and pop on another one. Those bits
took you know, sometimes eight hours or more to change over.
Then you start drilling, drilling again. And then once they
hit about four point three miles, it was pretty smooth
sailing up into that point. Then it got much more
dense and then things got just really really tough at
that point.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, the density of the rock really presented like a
big problem for them. Like up to that point, like
you said, it was pretty easy. It was just monotonous.
Now it was really hard. They were on a front
tier of vertical underground hole digging, and the reason why
the density of the rock proved to be problematic is
(25:04):
the denser rock would just push the the drill bit
over into less dense rock. So it made it really
hard to keep going straight down because the drill bit
it needs to get purchased, but it's way easier to
get purchase in less dense rock than the dense rockets
trying to go directly vertically through that created also lesser
(25:26):
known thing about the Cola Super deep borehole, and that
is it is not a single straight vertical shaft.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way, Like
they just drilled straight down, but when they encounter that
really really tough rock, the drill bit will like get
kicked to the side. Yeah, starts going a different way.
You know, they tried to you know, that presents problems
in and of itself, Like they try to use steal
pipes to reinforce the sides as they went a lot
Charlie Bunsen in the Great Escape. But the deeper they went,
(25:57):
those pipes, you know, we're having trouble with standing the pressure,
so they might break or they might kick out of line,
and then they have to fill that hole up to
where they were, go back above it and then drill
down around it. And so the uh, you know, it
looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down
and you know, if they had too much, like a
(26:19):
drill bit broke off completely, or maybe the sides that
piping caved in too much and they couldn't get around it,
they would have to go in like a fishing expedition
to try and get that stuff out, and that would
that would knock them offline for you know, days at
a time.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah. The article by Charlotte Wrigley says that one of
their fishing trips took five years. Five years, and so
to get around the rock and also to keep from
just standing around for five years, they would start another hole.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
But the reason why everybody calls it the super deep
bore hole, not bore holes, is because there was there
is one central shaft and then the other holes branch
off of that.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
So they the depth that they got to twelve two
hundred and sixty two meters, that's the depth. The actual
length that they drilled all over the place is I'm
not I didn't see the actual length, but it seems
like it's a lot more than.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
That, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
So they they still they kind of figured out a
workaround for the rock density problem, and then I think
at about twelve ten thousand feet less than or just
over three thousand meters, they encountered an issue that they
couldn't They found they eventually couldn't overcome.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, and that was temperature. They kind of had guestimated
correctly up into that point what the temperature was about
going to you know what it was. They thought it
was going to be at least and they were like this,
that'll be fine. But once they reached that point, there
was a big jump. It went from what was the
initial number, like two fourteen or so degrees all the
(28:01):
way up to three hundred and fifty six degrees fahrenheit
or one hundred and eighty degrees celsius. And that was
about twelve clicks down about seven and a half miles.
And as you heard at the beginning, it only went
down seven point six miles. So it was that it
was the heat that got them.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
The heat, my god, the heat.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Not even the humidity.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The heat, right, although we will find it's possible that
it's humid down there.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Ooh, what it's ease.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
That's a really great example of how the super deep borehole,
like rewrote science is. They mapped it all out there
like we're going to get to fifteen kilometers because we'll
be able to withstand the temperatures until then. And then
all of a sudden it got way hotter, way faster,
so much so that the basically what happened with the
(28:49):
pressure and the temperature together turned the rock in that
area essentially plastic key and not even like a hard
plastic like a chlorox bleach bottle. It was like like
a squishy plastic. Yeah. And it was basically like nailing
jellobran gelatin to the wall. That was what they were
(29:13):
trying to do at that point.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah. So, I mean at that point it was yet
it was over. They realized that they had gone as
far as they could go. That was nineteen eighty nine,
Like I said at the beginning, they kept trying for
another few years, I think until nineteen ninety two. Yeah,
and then they're like, yeah, this is really over. And
I think the whole project was officially sealed in two
(29:36):
thousand and five. But I mean they had a lot
of employees and stuff you know, that were on the books.
I think they weren't even paying them for a while,
right right.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I think at its peak there were like seven hundred
people who were employed there. If you look at pictures
of the place when it was in full swing, it
looks like a huge factory with one single giant smokestack
and that's actually where the derek for the drill bit went.
But it's like a little mini town almost. But as
it got shut down further and further and they finally
(30:04):
fully mothballed in two thousand and eight, those last few employees, yeah,
they hadn't been paid in six months. But the reason
why it really stopped in nineteen ninety two is because
they had bigger fish to fry, which was their country
had dissolved, and now they had to figure out where
to get funding from. And it turned out that no one,
none of the oligarchs were in any particular mood to
(30:25):
keep funding the super deep borehole, especially because it hadn't
gotten anywhere in three or four years.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Yeah, it was a you know, any stagnant project like
that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shut her.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I think, yeah, unfortunately, So all.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Right, maybe we should take a break and we'll talk
about what we learned from this super deep borehole. All right,
(31:13):
So we actually discovered a lot scientifically speaking by going
down that low. The first thing they did was like, well,
I guess let's do the obvious thing and change our
temperature maps, because now we know at what point it
gets like super super hot. So who's got an eraser, Ivan,
(31:33):
you have an eraser, you have the only eraser in
the room. Step forward and change those numbers. And they
were like, that's a great start, and let's move on
from here.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Right, So that was one thing. They also disproved something
that had been around since the thirties. So we talked
about the Moho discontinuity, which is between the mantle and
the crust, way further down than they went, but they
had expected to go through another discontinuity that was in
the upper crust. It was upper crust, the Conrad discontinuity,
(32:05):
which was also based on the same thing. This guy
Conrad paying attention to seismographic waves suddenly accelerating or speeding
up when it hit this one point in the crust.
It's like there's a discontinuity there. I predict that it's
a difference between granite and basalt. That we've got the
granite up top and then it transitions into basalt and
(32:26):
where they where they, where they meet, that's that discontinuity.
And it turned out that that was not correct, and
they were kind of mean about it. They called Conrad's
descendants and told them and mocked them over the phone.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, well I thought it was Conrad Baine and that
they called Todd Bridges his air Victor Conrad. You know
what just occurred to me. I believe when I said discontinuity,
I bet you that's how the brit say it.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
I'll bet you're right. I'd love to hear from our
brit friends about that.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
I would love to hear that too, as Kyle. Yeah,
but then we'd have to send a voice message. And
I wonder what Kyle sounds like. Actually, I wonder what
all of our writers sound like. We know what Dave
sounds like because we met him.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, that's a great question. Just blew my top.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
What if, like, we love Livia so much, what if
we got in touch with Livia and she was like
gentle blood. She was like a Julia child or something
that would be so fun.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It would be quite surprising.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
All right, So you teased liquid very cheekily earlier, and
they discovered that there was liquid water down there, like
much much deeper than they thought water could exist. They
found these cracks that had saline filled water, and they
were like this, this shouldn't be here. This is crazy,
like liquid is actually flowing down here. The Soviets like
(33:46):
released that information and most of the world at person
was like, yeah, right, like we're gonna buy that coming
from you.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Right, So yeah. The first fourteen years from nineteen seventy
to nineteen eighty four, the USSR, which was very famous
for keeping its scientific progress and finding secret, it didn't
share anything about this. I'm not even sure the outside
world knew that they were digging a hole. And then
in nineteen eighty four, at a geological conference, like a
(34:14):
world geological conference that they actually held in Moscow, they
announced that they had dug the world's deepest hole and
blew everyone away. And it seems like the reason that
they held this conference in nineteen eighty four was that
they just had dug the world's deepest hole, and they
wanted to tell everybody.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but it's kind of funny that they didn't believe
certain parts of it because it was coming from the
former Soviet Union, you.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Know, right, well this is full on Soviet Union too.
In nineteen eighty four. Oh yeah, yeah, but yeah, they
were like, how how would this even happen? Like, explain
to us how there's water. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
So what they found out was that, well, at first
they thought that it was squeezed out of crystals. Perhaps
it's pretty good, guests, but they found out the opposite
was true because of the study in twenty twenty three,
they found out that when these continental plates subduct, which
we've talked a lot about lately, like go under one
another and into the mantle in this case, they take
(35:11):
water with them along the way, and that can make
it all the way to that outer core. It interacts
with that molten iron, I think, and creates this like
kind of kind of filmy gook between the core, and
then that presses into crystals.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Right. Did you know that you could press water into crystals?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I didn't know any of this stuff. No.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
I also didn't know you could get water from crystals.
But think about like the mind boggling pressure that suggests
are going on at this point in the Earth.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
You know, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
It's so cool. Probably the biggest thing that everybody's socks
were knocked off by was that they were like, oh yeah,
by the way, seven kilometers down, almost four and a
half miles under the Earth's surface, we found marine organism
fossils dating back like two billion years top that comrades
(36:04):
pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
And I bet they were spooky looking, like a like
a you know, I saw garfish the other day when
I was paddle boarding in a lake and I almost
fell off because I looked down and it was right
at the surface on my left and you know, a garfish.
This was like two and a half feet long.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I reacted with such a start. I went, oh my
god that I lost my balance and almost fell off
the paddle board.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Meh.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
But and then I had a fear of like, you know,
this thing was some prehistoric creature that was going to
attack me once I was in the water, which is
of course not true. That thing was out of there
second it saw me, right, But I just imagine these
fossils down there. I mean, these things had to have
like teeth, they had to be creepy.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Right, I don't know. I didn't see any pictures of
them two billion years ago. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I've got a picture in my mind. It looks like
an alligator gar.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Okay, that's great, let's go with that, all right. But
the thing is is that's it doesn't suggest as a
lot of sites who sensationalize this super deep borehole as
we'll see, this doesn't mean that these things were ever
dwelling like four and a half miles beneath the Earth's surface,
right right, right. These were embedded two billion years ago
(37:16):
and then carried down through the cross toward the mantle
as part of that amazing plate tectonic process that keeps
the Earth going.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah. I mean what I wonder is if I mean
this was started in nineteen seventy discontinued in nineteen eighty nine.
That was a long time ago, and I wonder if
it's possible with today's technology to reach the mantle, and
if anyone is interested in that anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
I wondered if it was if I think I'm sure
that they are geologists and scientists who are still quite
interested in doing that.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
They want to, right, they want to. The funding dollars exactly.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, because I don't know that there's much much to
be gained from, you know, reaching the mantle if you're
a fossil fuel company, and that's if you're not getting
money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it
from fossil fuel companies. They probably, I would estimate, fund
ninety percent of the holes that are being dug around
(38:16):
the world right now.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
They're like, is there a giant bag of money down there?
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Exactly? Yeah, they're like, no, no, but not exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well you've lost my ear.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, they're like, get rid of this guy. So yes, though,
it's possible that some scientists will make it to the mantle.
And the reason why is because they will be drilling
not through you know, super thick parts of the crust,
but thin, thin parts of the oceanic.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Crust, right, and that counts.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
It definitely counts because you're still reaching the mantle.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
No, there's some places where the crust is so thin.
How thin is it? It's so thin, it's only five
and a half kilometers thick, and that is Yeah, that's
you know, almost a third of the depth of the
cola super deep bore.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, that's nineteen sixties level digging exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So there was actually a group that I guess was
attempting that they dug in a site off the coast
of Costa Rica. They dug hole twelve fifty six D.
They need to step up their name and convention.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I think maybe that stands for Dominoes.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
It probably doesn't sponsored it. The NOID was on board. Yeah,
in the early two thousands they started digging, and I
guess the NOID got bored and stopped giving them money.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, yeah, how far did they get? Stopped at one
point two five kilometers.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Which is so deep, so shallow. We're not even gonna
bother of translating that into.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Miles exactly, but kind of. One of the fun things
is they they removed an intact piece of crust. I
guess stepped it in some marin era. I couldn't resist
this one, so off the rails with the Dominoes theme
that I've really tried to avoid and then embraced.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
If you like their marinara, you should try their garlic
butter dipping sauce.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Man, why don't they sponsor us?
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
They really wish these were ads.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Everybody I would probably do Dominoes ads for free pizza.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
I am a shamed, Well not a shame. I'm proud
to say. Maybe I haven't had a Domino's pizza since
probably college.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
That's that's our go to pizza. If we get giant
chain pizza. Really, yeah, I still love Dominoes.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I guess I don't get any giant chain pizza. Not
as a stand. We just have so many good pizzaias
in Atlanta all over the place.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yes, that is true. There are not as many in Florida. Okay,
I don't know why, but there's not. But yes, Atlanta
is filthy, rich with really good pizza places.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
I thought you were going to say that, like you,
me and MoMA wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get
there in thirty minutes.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Where it's free.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
I'm hungry now, Josh, you know that.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, No, there's just not that many around here.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
All right, Well, well maybe we can take a meeting
with sales and turn this into liquid gold.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, can I have your free Dominoes if that's how
they say?
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Okay, sweet, we should mention this last little addendum. It
was kind of fun the Germans. Of course, they tried
to dig a deeper hole in the nineties and they
actually got to some higher temperatures their bits, the German
bits were able to withstand five hundred degrees fahrenheit or
two hundred and sixty degrees celsius, so that was a
(41:29):
big breakthrough. But they stopped at about five and a
half or five point six miles down or nine kilometers.
But the cool part about this is they got a
Dutch artist named Lota Geeven I'm not sure if that's
pronounced right. She lowered her microphone down in there, obviously
protected by heat shields and stuff like that, dropped it
(41:53):
down that German borehole and picked up a very rumbling
sound that science still cannot explain, and she said it
made her feel very small. First time in my life,
this big ball that we live on came to life,
and it sounded haunting, and she said some people thought
it sounded like hell, or like the planet was breathing.
So it's like, you know, that came from an old
(42:16):
Russian sort of suspicion that they were digging into hell.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Right, Yeah, there was an urban legend that started about
the time they stopped digging at the borehole that said
that the reason that they stopped digging was because they
had punctured through the roof of Hell and that somebody
had lowered a microphone down and they captured the sounds
of tormented souls in Hell screaming. And there are actual
(42:44):
YouTube videos that present this seriously, and you can go
hear it, and it's the most ridiculous thing you'll hear today.
But I also want to point out that what is it?
Lottie Gervin even, Yeah, yeah, like you said that, scientists
can't explain the sound that she actually did record. That's
(43:06):
not to say like this's a supernatural sound. They're just like,
there's so many processes going on down there, and we
so little understand that part of the earth. We can't
say what what makes that sound, But we think it's
a pretty cool sound and maybe someday we will be
able to explain it. What they are quite sure about
is that is not the sounds of Hell.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah, because that's not a real place.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I yeah, you should go listen to our episode on
Hell people. It was a pretty good one.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, you know, I imagine that there's just sounds like
a groan or you know, something moving around probably makes
a sound.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Right Yeah, it sounds really really industrial, but there's no
pattern to it, so like a patterned industrial sound is
what it sounds like. It's still it's pretty faint.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I bet some German musician turned that into a beat
or something.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Right, Yeah, let's see. I think that's about it. Yeah,
that's about it.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Great.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Okay, Well that was the Cola Super Deep Borehole. Everybody.
Hope you enjoyed it. Sorry for the anal bleaching references,
and I guess since I mentioned anal bleaching again, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
In fairness, you can't talk about the Cola Super Deeporehole
without talking about that, agreed. You know, all right, I'm
gonna call this feedback from the Mash episode. Hey, guys,
thank you for the episode on MASH. I was seven
years old in nineteen seventy two, and I really loved
the show so much that I learned to play the
theme song on the piano. My parents were too happy
to find out that the song discussed suicide, but I
(44:40):
don't even think I knew what that was at the time. Also,
there was at least one episode, because you guys talk
about the camp moving where there was a bug out
where the camp move closer or farther from the front lines.
And we got someone else that wrote in that said
the same thing, and like sort of the joke on
the show was that it was like kind of exactly
the same. Okay, they clearly didn't move this at And
(45:02):
then Dana Carson from Cleveland also says this. It never
occurred to me actually that BJ and Hawkeye were alcoholics.
I just assume they drank to pass the time. Yeah, sure,
just like alcoholics, right, Yeah, I mean I threw that
word around. You know, it was just sort of supposed
to be funny. Maybe they were just enjoyed drinking in
(45:24):
the hellish board they were in to pass the time.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah. I think it was a device to just show like, yeah,
you had to self medicator else you'd go crazy from
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
And that is Dana Carson from Cleveland who says in
a PS, I've been to Toledo and Tony Pakos many times.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Awesome way to go, Dana, right, Dana, Great, thanks a lot, Dana.
There's actually a Dana Corporation in around Toledo, if I'm
not mistaken. Maybe it's named after you, Dana. You should
go find out.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo,
say like Libby or Owens or Jeep. We want to
hear from you. You can email us at stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's
here two and Jerry's here too. Because this one's so exciting.
Jerry said, I wouldn't miss this one for the world,
and this is stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
You should know unless I had some minor appointment or
meeting that I could easily move.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
It's so great that Jerry just doesn't talk on this
because we can see whatever we want and we can't
hear what she's saying in response.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, it would be fun as if we were doing
our fun poking at Jerry sometimes and she just cut
in and said, cope yourself, guys.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Right, I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Maybe we can beat that out. That'd be fun.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We'll see. But yes, she's excited about this one. And
she even said it's not going to be boring, or
is it? And we said, Jerry, pipe down boring.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Wasn't that a Simpson s thing?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Boring? I don't know. It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, I feel like Reverend love Joy did that in
a sermon one time that led them into like a
flashback or something very distant memory.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It sounds like you're talking about the Mister Sparkle episode
where Marge becomes the listen lady at church and Reverend
Lovejoy's completely lost like his I guess pastoral sense. And
the flashback you're talking about is when he traces it
back to the first time he met ned Flanders who
(01:37):
came to him for advice because he'd just done the
bump and his rear end touched the rear end of
another young man and he was up in arms about it.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
And maybe he was saying boring because it was a
ned Flanders flashback. It's possible somebody will know this one.
I'm pretty sure it was Lovejoy though.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Okay, well it didn't, Yeah, it didn't. We should have
said that in unison.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Have been great.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
We're talking today not about the Simpsons, although we just
have and that's great. We're talking today about a different
kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the
United States. Got a lot less press, way less press.
It got a lot less money and funding and you know,
attension and technology and engineers and brains thrown at it.
(02:25):
But I also wonder, Chuck, if we downplay it because
the USSR beat US so soundly at this particular race.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Maybe, yeah, that's possible, because you know, of course, we're
not talking about going to outer space. We're talking about
boring deep into the Earth and digging a deep hole.
And we're going to talk about that now in the
form of the Cola Borhole KOLA. And this started in
the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yes, well, yes, I think the idea started in the sixties,
but they started drilling in the seventh nineteen. But let's
not get ahead of ourselves, because the Soviets were actually
following the American lead. America made the first shot over
the Soviets bow by drilling into the undearth the vow first. Yeah,
(03:14):
I think him. They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
That's right. In nineteen fifty eight, we launched something called
Project Mohole, and this is like, hey, let's dig down
to the mantle. Let's get a sample off of Guadalupe Island,
Like let's go through the ocean floor, because the ocean's
already deep, so let's just go ahead and start down there.
And the name Project Mohole is a bit of a
(03:42):
science sciencey nerdy joke that plays on the Moho discontinuity
or discontinuity. How would you say?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The second one?
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Second one, and that is the the Moho discontinuity. Is
the region worthy crust and the mantle meet up and
say hello, right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
And they were, I mean this is theoretical. We should say.
It's named after a guy named a I think it's
Mohorovicic of Croatia, who back in nineteen oh nine, nineteen
oh nine, mind you, was studying seismic waves from earthquakes
so closely that he realized that at some point in
(04:24):
the Earth's crust they actually like speed up, they hit
some literal inflection point, and he was like, there's some
sort of boundary there, maybe even a discontinuity, as chuckle
later say, and he well, it became I don't think
he named it after himself, but it became called the
Moho discontinuity. Like you said, it was hypothetical as theoretical,
(04:46):
but one reason they named it that is because ultimately
the goal was to drill right through the crust into
the mantle. That's the money lithosphere.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, for sure. And you know what, nothing turns me
on more than scientifically speaking, then early science where they
someone got it right, you know what I mean? Yeah,
Like it's fun to talk about blood letting and stuff
like that. But I love it when somebody, like way
before they know about this stuff, has an idea and
(05:18):
it kind of bears out to be correct. I just
love that stuff. So hats off to you Croatian scientist
whose name I'm not going to.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Try if blood lighting is wrong, I don't want to
be right, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
I also want to give a shout out to the
group of scientists, the informal drinking group called the American
Miscellaneous Society or AMSOCK.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, they seem fun, huh.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
They came up with this idea in the fifties, and
it was one of many ideas that they had, most
of which were just totally ridiculous in outlandish, like towing
icebergs to California to use for irrigation. This one actually
had legs, and it got funding from the National Science Association,
and they got to drilling, like you said in Guadaloupe,
and they it actually got funding from the National Academy
(06:05):
of Sciences and they started drilling, and well, I guess
what the Gulf of the Pacific, Oh God is Mexico
and island.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Your desire for specificity gets you in so much trouble.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Okay, well, at any rate, just they started drilling. Yeah, wow,
that felt really good. I've never tried that before. Huh.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, vagary is my secret weapon.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Okay, thanks for letting me in on it. I think
I've just turned over a new leaf.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah, they got that funding. They made it down about
just over six hundred feet, which is not too bad. This,
to me is one of the more fun facts of
the whole episode. Like this, John Steinbeck, the author went
along to document it. Mm hmm, Like who should we get?
I don't know. Steinbeck's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
That's where he got the idea for the end of
Mice and Men. There was a one of the engineers
accidentally dropped a sample, a very precious sample. Yeah, and
rather than let the rest of the crew kill the
guy in a terrible fashion, he stuck up behind him
and took his life.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
That's good. Wait with Steinbeck the Pearl.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Is that what his nickname was, the Pearl?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Or did he write the Pearl? Because that was about
pearl diving, So I'm pretty sure that was Steinbeck. So
he may obviously had some sort of interest in going
under the sea.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
He did. Actually, it's funny you say that because he
was a I think a trained marine biologist, or he
was planning on going into marine biology and never really
lost his love of it.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, pretty cool, so awesome project. They pulled the plug
in nineteen sixty six, or I guess rather they stuck
in the plug in nineteen sixty six when the US
House representative said no more, no more drilling. And then
four years later the Soviets set off to do a
deep drilling attempt when they drilled into the earth in Mirmansk, Russia,
(08:02):
just near the Norwegian border, near the Barren See. And
this is it. This is the Cola Super Deep Borehole
aka the deepest hole ever dug by human beings.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, still to this day. Yeah. And it's named Cola
because it's on the Cola Peninsula. Kola, did you spell it?
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I love it. It's worth spelling again and another time, Kola.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It's like a Cola nut exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
The thing is, Chuck is for as stupendous an achievement
as this is. And if you're a geologist, if you're
an earth scientist basically of any sort, this is a
stupendous achievement that they carried out in Soviet Russia in
the seventies and eighties. It's just been completely like left
to rod. Did you see those pictures of it now?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I mean you walk right past the thing and
not even though it's there.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Right, And the the reason why you could walk right
past is because it's the whole The hole I was
going to say, the whole hole, which makes sense, is
only like nine inches in diameter. I think that's twenty
three centimeters, yeah, twenty three centimeters right.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, It's like I went caving that time, and instead
of walking into a big rocky cave, I like crawled
into a small hole in the ground. I know, but
that's the same deal. Like nine inches is very small.
It has got a plate secured over it with some
old rusty bolts, and I think you found out they
even etched on top of what it was, but they
(09:34):
got the number wrong, right.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah. As we'll see, the Coola super deep borehole got
all the way down to twelve thou two hundred and
sixty two meters into the Earth's crust, and we'll tell
you about just how deep that it will put in
perspective in a second. But when they put the when
they wrote down how deep it was, they transposed the
last two numbers, so they shorted it by thirty four
(10:00):
thirty eight meters maybe something around that.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, and you might be disappointed to know if you
like took some took a ranch out there, and you're like,
I got to drop a rock in that thing just
to see if I can hear anything, and took that
plate off. Let's say you were able to, you wouldn't
be able to drop anything in it, just because of
the Earth's movement over time. It is no longer like,
at least at that point, like a continuous hole. It's
(10:26):
kind of shifted and fulled and kind of caved in
in places, and it is full of gunk.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It is. And legend has it that if you had
recorded the movements of the Earth over that time span
and played it back at fast speed, you would hear
the Earth going as it subsided the deepest hole in
the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
The status of Trombones exactly, all right, So you promised
talk about how deep this thing was, and in true
stuff you should know fashion. We're gonna have several examples,
none of which Big Max surprisingly no.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
But there is a Domino's pizza reference in there.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
I was hoping not to not mention that.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
No, it's that specificity thing I have running through. I'm
just gonna say it. The diameter the hole is about
as big around as a small pizza from Dominoes there.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
That's right. I think people are suspicious of all of
our brand mentioned, so I was trying to avoid those.
Oh really, yeah, come on people, Hey, you know that's
the thing. So this thing is deep, deep, deep. It
is about seven point six miles deep, about twelve thousand,
two hundred and sixty two meters or two hundred and
thirty feet deep. Like we said, the deepest hole ever.
(11:38):
It is lower than it's deeper than the lowest point
of the Mariana Trench. That's a pretty fun one. Sure
got a height perspective.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Height wise, it's it's deeper than the highest point on
Earth is tall, Mount Everest. In fact, it's so much
deeper than Mountain eversus is tall you could put Mount
Fuji on top of Mount ever and the Cola Borhole
would still be deeper than those two sacked on top
of one another.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, So that's it. That's a deep thing. Everybody.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Well, wait a minute, Wait a minute, there's one more
that knocks my socks off. Can I say it?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
It's probably the one I scribbled through. So yes, let's
hear it.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It is deeper than the height of the average cruising
altitude of a commercial airliner, specifically Delta Airlines.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yep, I scratched right through that thing. I was like,
we don't need that many examples. I love to take
that one, all right. So this went down into the
outermost layer of the Earth, which is continental crust, that
is like what we're standing on right now. They wanted
to reach the mantle with their technology. They thought they
could get down to nine point three miles, but only
(12:44):
made it seven point six.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That's right, yes, and nine point three mile sounds like
a really weird goal. But it turns out that they
were going for fifteen kilometers.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Yeah, but they thought that was I guess out of
reach if they figured nine point three was reasonable.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So yeah, and we will. There was an article I
found it was It's called Going Deep Excavation, Collaboration and
Imagination at the Cola Super Deep Borehole. It was written
by Charlotte Wriggley and published an Environment and Planning d
the Journal in twenty twenty three, and Charlotte Wrigglely points
out that the Cola Super Deep Borehole raised more questions
(13:24):
than answered them because one of the things they thought
is that this stuff was going to confirm all of
the predictions that Earth scientists had made over time, and
the fact that they thought they were going to get
down fifteen kilometers and the reasons that they didn't get
down that far. Basically, it's like a great example of
what the Cola Super Deep Borehole did, which was take
(13:46):
science and churn it up like a huge swath of
the Earth during an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, totally. Uh, that's maybe a good time for a break.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, let's do that, all right.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
We'll be right back everybody with more on this deep
deep hole.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So, Chuck, we should probably just do a quick primer
of eighth grader science, maybe of the layers of the Earth,
if you'll bear with me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
So you've got the outermost layer, the crust made up
of the continental crust, which is what we stand on,
and the oceanic crust, which is at the bottom of
the sea. Beneath that, you got the mantle and by
the way, the crust averages about twenty five miles or
forty kilometers thick. After that you got the mantle way thicker,
eighteen hundred miles thick. Then you hit the outer core.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
You hit the.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Inner core, which has a diameter of about twelve hundred
and thirty miles or nineteen hundred and eighty kilometers, which
happens to be about the distance from Topeka, Kansas to
Klondike Buff's Bluff's Utah.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Okay, you said that's the radius.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
That is No, that's the diameter, the full diameter of
the inner core. And then possibly there's also a super
liquid inner inner core that represents the centermost point of Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
That's right, and that's where Ronnie James Dio resides. Yeah,
I think.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So I've got to give an obligatory shout out to
the greatest tattoo ever. Oh okay, remember that one of
Dio on somebody's forearm.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
So for those of you who don't know what I'm
talking about, there's a tattoo out there of Ronnie Dio
making like the devil horns, but the perspective is done
in a way that it looks like Dio's arm turns
into the person with the tattoos, arm and fingers, so
they make the devil horns and it looks like Ronnie
Dio is. The perspective is just that amazing.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah. The only problem is it involves your armpit, right,
you know. Yeah, it's really kind of the worst part
of the body to me. The arm pit not a
fan to me.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
There's other parts that are grosser.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Like the butthole.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Sure, unless it's been recently.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Bleached between the dose. Oh my god, coming from the
guy who just said butthole, now I'm offended.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
I got that from Bruno. Remember the Sasha Baron Cohen movie. Bruno, Yeah,
you got what aintal bleaching?
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Oh? Is that first time you heard of that?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah? I hadn't heard of it before.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Okay, man, this is great episode. I mean we are
talking about super deepoles. So what we're trying to say is,
while it is impressive to go down seven point six miles,
that is like about a third of the Earth's crust alone.
So they were trying to get to the mantle and
that's just I mean, that doesn't seem like it's possible
(17:01):
that that could ever happen. R And it took years
and years to do. They started this project on May
twenty fourth, nineteen seventy and by nineteen seventy nine that
had broken all digging records. By nineteen eighty nine they
had reached that depth of forty two hundred and thirty feet,
which was kind of it. The project was opened for
(17:23):
a little while longer after that, but for reasons we
will go over soon you'll learn why. That was basically
about as deep as they could go. In nineteen eighty nine,
they were like, we can't get Kney deeper.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah. The one that it's like the reverse perspective that
gets me is that they dug point two percent of
the entire distance to the center point of the Earth. So,
like you said, it's impressive in some terms. In other terms,
it's just kind of a stupid hole, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, And you know there's if you're wondering, like why
would they even do this? What's down there? There's a
lot of reasons. There are a lot of deep holes
all over the world. Most of those are for like,
you know, mineral extraction or fossil fuel extraction or metals,
you know, ors things like that. There's the one hundred
year old Bingham Canyon Copper Mine and Salt Lake City. Yeah,
(18:10):
pretty great. Three quarters of a mile deep, but two
and a half miles across, So that is a snow
small pizza.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Now there's another one called the Big Hole. It's in
South Africa, belongs to the Kimberly Diamond Mine. It's one
of the largest holes in the world, with the caveat
of holes that were dug by human hands in no machinery,
which sounds pretty impressive unless you realize that you can
threaten to cut off those people's hands if they don't
use them to dig, then you can get it done.
(18:41):
And I'm quite sure that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, I did not even look into that, and I
just had great certainty that that was a completely exploitive experience.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Well, even if it's not true, we should be forgiven
because we're talking about South Africa diamond mines and giant
holes dug by hand. You can it's a pretty pretty
reasonable surmization.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah sermization, I don't know. I love it all right.
So that's one reason why you can dig down is
you know, for minerals and fossil heels and stuff like that.
But you can also just learn a lot about science,
and we did learn a lot about science through or
you know, the Soviets did, and we did through our
deep poles. But you know, like you mentioned earthquakes, obviously geohazards,
(19:25):
they ended up learning a lot about that stuff, and
we'll detail that a little bit. Geothermal heat and energy
is another big one. Oh, I don't know, maybe about
climate change and what's happened in the past that you
could find from digging deep, or maybe just like, hey,
we know a lot more about outer space than we
do about what's under our feet, so let's get down
there and see what we can learn.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, the place that they were digging so like we
usually dig ice cores to kind of get an idea
of climate change. Yeah, that's actually in the fairly recent past.
We're talking on the order of tens of hundreds of
thousands of years.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
The crust that they were digging into is pre Cambrian,
meaning that it came together and was formed from anywhere
between the origin of Earth to five hundred and thirty
eight million years ago, So it is super old. There's
a lot of secrets that could be unlocked just by
boring into it and looking at what comes up. Right,
(20:22):
So that's that's a good reason. Also, fossil fuels you
really can't look past. This is the seventies and eighties,
so they're One of the stated goals of the KSB
was to basically figure out new techniques for drilling super
deep oil wells, essentially because they said that it would
(20:44):
be a great benefit to mankind if we can learn
how to dig out fossil fuels that are deeper that
we can't currently reach.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, for sure, you know, I mentioned promise of earthquake talk.
They did just come up a lot lately again, but
they did learn about that stuff like if you go
really deep into the spot lines, you can detect, you know,
these tiny minute quakes that you don't even feel up
topside where we are. And you know, all of that
is usually about just learning how to get more accurate
(21:13):
predictions in the future. You know, they do like computer
simulations and stuff, but they need data input to do
those simulations right, and these holes give you great data
for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
They also have figured out how to use all of
that seismographic data to basically turn the resonance or the
way they resonate through Earth into images of inner Earth.
Itself fun and that really kind of I mean, you
can get if you're looking at mega colossal geology. There's
no reason I would say to dig anymore. Like if
(21:48):
we can do that kind of thing, I mean dig
to put you know, deeper and deeper seismographs, but not
to necessarily find out what inner Earth is like, because
we can image it like that in the same way
that if you have a watch one of those cool
archaeological shows on BBC, sometimes they'll have what looks like
a like a tamper, like a walk behind tamper, but
(22:10):
it has a shotgun shell that you put into it
and you show a shotgun shell. Yeah, it's like a
seismographic imager and it shows you what's you know, buried
beneath the ground in that field or whatever. This is
the same thing, except they're taking the data not from
the resonance from a shotgun shell, but from the resonance
of earthquakes in Earth and turning those into images.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah, and you know we also
want to just like pull stuff out of there and
see what it looks like, what's going on down there,
like what our deep deep crust looks like. When you
know they bring stuff out, it's generally pretty crumbly by
that point and kind of falls apart because of atmospheric
pressure changes and stuff like that. So you know, getting
(22:52):
those pictures of what things look like in their sort
of undisturbed state is beneficial, right.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And if you're like all these seems kind of flimsy,
holes are they're super deep. Holes are the greatest example
of humans curiosity just for the sake of knowing something new. Yeah,
then you'll find just about anywhere.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, don't stifle that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
People no get it the program.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So another question you might have is why did it
take so long? And why is it so hard to do?
And why aren't we able to just go deeper and
deeper and deeper? Like why they have to stop? Kind
of all those big questions, and it's you know, they
didn't realize until they got started. I don't think they
thought it was gonna be a cakewalk, but they didn't
realize until they really started digging down there that it's
(23:40):
not the easiest thing in the world to do and
there's a lot of complications that can arise. They didn't
at first. You found this YouTube site called half as
Interesting that we're talking about the drill bits, like they
did a great job through granted they have you know,
it's like a boring drill bit. It's like a you know,
like a windy cone with like teeth on the outside
of it, you know, to bore a hole. This kind
(24:02):
of stuff They used to like board subway tunnels and
you know, all kinds of tunnels through mountain, but in
this case they were going straight down. Those can only
work for about four hours until you need to replace
that bit, like the bit wears off and that's only
about thirty feet or so, depending on where you're digging
and how hard that rock is, and then you can't
just pop it off like a drill you get from
(24:23):
the hardware store and pop on another one. Those bits
took you know, sometimes eight hours or more to change over.
Then you start drilling, drilling again. And then once they
hit about four point three miles, it was pretty smooth
sailing up into that point. Then it got much more
dense and then things got just really really tough at
that point.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, the density of the rock really presented like a
big problem for them. Like up to that point, like
you said, it was pretty easy. It was just monotonous.
Now it was really hard. They were on a front
tier of vertical underground hole digging, and the reason why
the density of the rock proved to be problematic is
(25:04):
the denser rock would just push the the drill bit
over into less dense rock. So it made it really
hard to keep going straight down because the drill bit
it needs to get purchased, but it's way easier to
get purchase in less dense rock than the dense rockets
trying to go directly vertically through that created also lesser
(25:26):
known thing about the Cola Super deep borehole, and that
is it is not a single straight vertical shaft.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way, Like
they just drilled straight down, but when they encounter that
really really tough rock, the drill bit will like get
kicked to the side. Yeah, starts going a different way.
You know, they tried to you know, that presents problems
in and of itself, Like they try to use steal
pipes to reinforce the sides as they went a lot
Charlie Bunsen in the Great Escape. But the deeper they went,
(25:57):
those pipes, you know, we're having trouble with standing the pressure,
so they might break or they might kick out of line,
and then they have to fill that hole up to
where they were, go back above it and then drill
down around it. And so the uh, you know, it
looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down
and you know, if they had too much, like a
(26:19):
drill bit broke off completely, or maybe the sides that
piping caved in too much and they couldn't get around it,
they would have to go in like a fishing expedition
to try and get that stuff out, and that would
that would knock them offline for you know, days at
a time.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah. The article by Charlotte Wrigley says that one of
their fishing trips took five years. Five years, and so
to get around the rock and also to keep from
just standing around for five years, they would start another hole.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
But the reason why everybody calls it the super deep
bore hole, not bore holes, is because there was there
is one central shaft and then the other holes branch
off of that.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
So they the depth that they got to twelve two
hundred and sixty two meters, that's the depth. The actual
length that they drilled all over the place is I'm
not I didn't see the actual length, but it seems
like it's a lot more than.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
That, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
So they they still they kind of figured out a
workaround for the rock density problem, and then I think
at about twelve ten thousand feet less than or just
over three thousand meters, they encountered an issue that they
couldn't They found they eventually couldn't overcome.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, and that was temperature. They kind of had guestimated
correctly up into that point what the temperature was about
going to you know what it was. They thought it
was going to be at least and they were like this,
that'll be fine. But once they reached that point, there
was a big jump. It went from what was the
initial number, like two fourteen or so degrees all the
(28:01):
way up to three hundred and fifty six degrees fahrenheit
or one hundred and eighty degrees celsius. And that was
about twelve clicks down about seven and a half miles.
And as you heard at the beginning, it only went
down seven point six miles. So it was that it
was the heat that got them.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
The heat, my god, the heat.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Not even the humidity.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The heat, right, although we will find it's possible that
it's humid down there.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Ooh, what it's ease.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
That's a really great example of how the super deep borehole,
like rewrote science is. They mapped it all out there
like we're going to get to fifteen kilometers because we'll
be able to withstand the temperatures until then. And then
all of a sudden it got way hotter, way faster,
so much so that the basically what happened with the
(28:49):
pressure and the temperature together turned the rock in that
area essentially plastic key and not even like a hard
plastic like a chlorox bleach bottle. It was like like
a squishy plastic. Yeah. And it was basically like nailing
jellobran gelatin to the wall. That was what they were
(29:13):
trying to do at that point.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah. So, I mean at that point it was yet
it was over. They realized that they had gone as
far as they could go. That was nineteen eighty nine,
Like I said at the beginning, they kept trying for
another few years, I think until nineteen ninety two. Yeah,
and then they're like, yeah, this is really over. And
I think the whole project was officially sealed in two
(29:36):
thousand and five. But I mean they had a lot
of employees and stuff you know, that were on the books.
I think they weren't even paying them for a while,
right right.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I think at its peak there were like seven hundred
people who were employed there. If you look at pictures
of the place when it was in full swing, it
looks like a huge factory with one single giant smokestack
and that's actually where the derek for the drill bit went.
But it's like a little mini town almost. But as
it got shut down further and further and they finally
(30:04):
fully mothballed in two thousand and eight, those last few employees, yeah,
they hadn't been paid in six months. But the reason
why it really stopped in nineteen ninety two is because
they had bigger fish to fry, which was their country
had dissolved, and now they had to figure out where
to get funding from. And it turned out that no one,
none of the oligarchs were in any particular mood to
(30:25):
keep funding the super deep borehole, especially because it hadn't
gotten anywhere in three or four years.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Yeah, it was a you know, any stagnant project like
that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shut her.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
I think, yeah, unfortunately, So all.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Right, maybe we should take a break and we'll talk
about what we learned from this super deep borehole. All right,
(31:13):
So we actually discovered a lot scientifically speaking by going
down that low. The first thing they did was like, well,
I guess let's do the obvious thing and change our
temperature maps, because now we know at what point it
gets like super super hot. So who's got an eraser, Ivan,
(31:33):
you have an eraser, you have the only eraser in
the room. Step forward and change those numbers. And they
were like, that's a great start, and let's move on
from here.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Right, So that was one thing. They also disproved something
that had been around since the thirties. So we talked
about the Moho discontinuity, which is between the mantle and
the crust, way further down than they went, but they
had expected to go through another discontinuity that was in
the upper crust. It was upper crust, the Conrad discontinuity,
(32:05):
which was also based on the same thing. This guy
Conrad paying attention to seismographic waves suddenly accelerating or speeding
up when it hit this one point in the crust.
It's like there's a discontinuity there. I predict that it's
a difference between granite and basalt. That we've got the
granite up top and then it transitions into basalt and
(32:26):
where they where they, where they meet, that's that discontinuity.
And it turned out that that was not correct, and
they were kind of mean about it. They called Conrad's
descendants and told them and mocked them over the phone.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, well I thought it was Conrad Baine and that
they called Todd Bridges his air Victor Conrad. You know
what just occurred to me. I believe when I said discontinuity,
I bet you that's how the brit say it.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
I'll bet you're right. I'd love to hear from our
brit friends about that.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
I would love to hear that too, as Kyle. Yeah,
but then we'd have to send a voice message. And
I wonder what Kyle sounds like. Actually, I wonder what
all of our writers sound like. We know what Dave
sounds like because we met him.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, that's a great question. Just blew my top.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
What if, like, we love Livia so much, what if
we got in touch with Livia and she was like
gentle blood. She was like a Julia child or something
that would be so fun.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It would be quite surprising.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
All right, So you teased liquid very cheekily earlier, and
they discovered that there was liquid water down there, like
much much deeper than they thought water could exist. They
found these cracks that had saline filled water, and they
were like this, this shouldn't be here. This is crazy,
like liquid is actually flowing down here. The Soviets like
(33:46):
released that information and most of the world at person
was like, yeah, right, like we're gonna buy that coming
from you.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Right, So yeah. The first fourteen years from nineteen seventy
to nineteen eighty four, the USSR, which was very famous
for keeping its scientific progress and finding secret, it didn't
share anything about this. I'm not even sure the outside
world knew that they were digging a hole. And then
in nineteen eighty four, at a geological conference, like a
(34:14):
world geological conference that they actually held in Moscow, they
announced that they had dug the world's deepest hole and
blew everyone away. And it seems like the reason that
they held this conference in nineteen eighty four was that
they just had dug the world's deepest hole, and they
wanted to tell everybody.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but it's kind of funny that they didn't believe
certain parts of it because it was coming from the
former Soviet Union, you.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Know, right, well this is full on Soviet Union too.
In nineteen eighty four. Oh yeah, yeah, but yeah, they
were like, how how would this even happen? Like, explain
to us how there's water. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
So what they found out was that, well, at first
they thought that it was squeezed out of crystals. Perhaps
it's pretty good, guests, but they found out the opposite
was true because of the study in twenty twenty three,
they found out that when these continental plates subduct, which
we've talked a lot about lately, like go under one
another and into the mantle in this case, they take
(35:11):
water with them along the way, and that can make
it all the way to that outer core. It interacts
with that molten iron, I think, and creates this like
kind of kind of filmy gook between the core, and
then that presses into crystals.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Right. Did you know that you could press water into crystals?
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I didn't know any of this stuff. No.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
I also didn't know you could get water from crystals.
But think about like the mind boggling pressure that suggests
are going on at this point in the Earth.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
You know, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
It's so cool. Probably the biggest thing that everybody's socks
were knocked off by was that they were like, oh yeah,
by the way, seven kilometers down, almost four and a
half miles under the Earth's surface, we found marine organism
fossils dating back like two billion years top that comrades
(36:04):
pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
And I bet they were spooky looking, like a like
a you know, I saw garfish the other day when
I was paddle boarding in a lake and I almost
fell off because I looked down and it was right
at the surface on my left and you know, a garfish.
This was like two and a half feet long.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I reacted with such a start. I went, oh my
god that I lost my balance and almost fell off
the paddle board.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Meh.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
But and then I had a fear of like, you know,
this thing was some prehistoric creature that was going to
attack me once I was in the water, which is
of course not true. That thing was out of there
second it saw me, right, But I just imagine these
fossils down there. I mean, these things had to have
like teeth, they had to be creepy.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Right, I don't know. I didn't see any pictures of
them two billion years ago. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I've got a picture in my mind. It looks like
an alligator gar.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Okay, that's great, let's go with that, all right. But
the thing is is that's it doesn't suggest as a
lot of sites who sensationalize this super deep borehole as
we'll see, this doesn't mean that these things were ever
dwelling like four and a half miles beneath the Earth's surface,
right right, right. These were embedded two billion years ago
(37:16):
and then carried down through the cross toward the mantle
as part of that amazing plate tectonic process that keeps
the Earth going.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah. I mean what I wonder is if I mean
this was started in nineteen seventy discontinued in nineteen eighty nine.
That was a long time ago, and I wonder if
it's possible with today's technology to reach the mantle, and
if anyone is interested in that anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
I wondered if it was if I think I'm sure
that they are geologists and scientists who are still quite
interested in doing that.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
They want to, right, they want to. The funding dollars exactly.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, because I don't know that there's much much to
be gained from, you know, reaching the mantle if you're
a fossil fuel company, and that's if you're not getting
money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it
from fossil fuel companies. They probably, I would estimate, fund
ninety percent of the holes that are being dug around
(38:16):
the world right now.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
They're like, is there a giant bag of money down there?
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Exactly? Yeah, they're like, no, no, but not exactly.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well you've lost my ear.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah, they're like, get rid of this guy. So yes, though,
it's possible that some scientists will make it to the mantle.
And the reason why is because they will be drilling
not through you know, super thick parts of the crust,
but thin, thin parts of the oceanic.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Crust, right, and that counts.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
It definitely counts because you're still reaching the mantle.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
No, there's some places where the crust is so thin.
How thin is it? It's so thin, it's only five
and a half kilometers thick, and that is Yeah, that's
you know, almost a third of the depth of the
cola super deep bore.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, that's nineteen sixties level digging exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So there was actually a group that I guess was
attempting that they dug in a site off the coast
of Costa Rica. They dug hole twelve fifty six D.
They need to step up their name and convention.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I think maybe that stands for Dominoes.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
It probably doesn't sponsored it. The NOID was on board. Yeah,
in the early two thousands they started digging, and I
guess the NOID got bored and stopped giving them money.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, yeah, how far did they get? Stopped at one
point two five kilometers.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Which is so deep, so shallow. We're not even gonna
bother of translating that into.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Miles exactly, but kind of. One of the fun things
is they they removed an intact piece of crust. I
guess stepped it in some marin era. I couldn't resist
this one, so off the rails with the Dominoes theme
that I've really tried to avoid and then embraced.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
If you like their marinara, you should try their garlic
butter dipping sauce.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Man, why don't they sponsor us?
Speaker 2 (40:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
They really wish these were ads.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Everybody I would probably do Dominoes ads for free pizza.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
I am a shamed, Well not a shame. I'm proud
to say. Maybe I haven't had a Domino's pizza since
probably college.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
That's that's our go to pizza. If we get giant
chain pizza. Really, yeah, I still love Dominoes.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
I guess I don't get any giant chain pizza. Not
as a stand. We just have so many good pizzaias
in Atlanta all over the place.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yes, that is true. There are not as many in Florida. Okay,
I don't know why, but there's not. But yes, Atlanta
is filthy, rich with really good pizza places.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
I thought you were going to say that, like you,
me and MoMA wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get
there in thirty minutes.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Where it's free.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
I'm hungry now, Josh, you know that.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, No, there's just not that many around here.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
All right, Well, well maybe we can take a meeting
with sales and turn this into liquid gold.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, can I have your free Dominoes if that's how
they say?
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Okay, sweet, we should mention this last little addendum. It
was kind of fun the Germans. Of course, they tried
to dig a deeper hole in the nineties and they
actually got to some higher temperatures their bits, the German
bits were able to withstand five hundred degrees fahrenheit or
two hundred and sixty degrees celsius, so that was a
(41:29):
big breakthrough. But they stopped at about five and a
half or five point six miles down or nine kilometers.
But the cool part about this is they got a
Dutch artist named Lota Geeven I'm not sure if that's
pronounced right. She lowered her microphone down in there, obviously
protected by heat shields and stuff like that, dropped it
(41:53):
down that German borehole and picked up a very rumbling
sound that science still cannot explain, and she said it
made her feel very small. First time in my life,
this big ball that we live on came to life,
and it sounded haunting, and she said some people thought
it sounded like hell, or like the planet was breathing.
So it's like, you know, that came from an old
(42:16):
Russian sort of suspicion that they were digging into hell.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Right, Yeah, there was an urban legend that started about
the time they stopped digging at the borehole that said
that the reason that they stopped digging was because they
had punctured through the roof of Hell and that somebody
had lowered a microphone down and they captured the sounds
of tormented souls in Hell screaming. And there are actual
(42:44):
YouTube videos that present this seriously, and you can go
hear it, and it's the most ridiculous thing you'll hear today.
But I also want to point out that what is it?
Lottie Gervin even, Yeah, yeah, like you said that, scientists
can't explain the sound that she actually did record. That's
(43:06):
not to say like this's a supernatural sound. They're just like,
there's so many processes going on down there, and we
so little understand that part of the earth. We can't
say what what makes that sound, But we think it's
a pretty cool sound and maybe someday we will be
able to explain it. What they are quite sure about
is that is not the sounds of Hell.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah, because that's not a real place.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I yeah, you should go listen to our episode on
Hell people. It was a pretty good one.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, you know, I imagine that there's just sounds like
a groan or you know, something moving around probably makes
a sound.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Right Yeah, it sounds really really industrial, but there's no
pattern to it, so like a patterned industrial sound is
what it sounds like. It's still it's pretty faint.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I bet some German musician turned that into a beat
or something.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Right, Yeah, let's see. I think that's about it. Yeah,
that's about it.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Great.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Okay, Well that was the Cola Super Deep Borehole. Everybody.
Hope you enjoyed it. Sorry for the anal bleaching references,
and I guess since I mentioned anal bleaching again, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
In fairness, you can't talk about the Cola Super Deeporehole
without talking about that, agreed. You know, all right, I'm
gonna call this feedback from the Mash episode. Hey, guys,
thank you for the episode on MASH. I was seven
years old in nineteen seventy two, and I really loved
the show so much that I learned to play the
theme song on the piano. My parents were too happy
to find out that the song discussed suicide, but I
(44:40):
don't even think I knew what that was at the time. Also,
there was at least one episode, because you guys talk
about the camp moving where there was a bug out
where the camp move closer or farther from the front lines.
And we got someone else that wrote in that said
the same thing, and like sort of the joke on
the show was that it was like kind of exactly
the same. Okay, they clearly didn't move this at And
(45:02):
then Dana Carson from Cleveland also says this. It never
occurred to me actually that BJ and Hawkeye were alcoholics.
I just assume they drank to pass the time. Yeah, sure,
just like alcoholics, right, Yeah, I mean I threw that
word around. You know, it was just sort of supposed
to be funny. Maybe they were just enjoyed drinking in
(45:24):
the hellish board they were in to pass the time.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah. I think it was a device to just show like, yeah,
you had to self medicator else you'd go crazy from
the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
And that is Dana Carson from Cleveland who says in
a PS, I've been to Toledo and Tony Pakos many times.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Awesome way to go, Dana, right, Dana, Great, thanks a lot, Dana.
There's actually a Dana Corporation in around Toledo, if I'm
not mistaken. Maybe it's named after you, Dana. You should
go find out.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo,
say like Libby or Owens or Jeep. We want to
hear from you. You can email us at stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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