Only one month ago, the Chinese state company National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) announced that it had finally completed the drilling of the vertical well ‘Shenditake 1’. Located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, northwest of the country, it has become the deepest of Asia with its 10,910 meters. We already informed this project in June 2023, when ABC said that the communist giant has just started, the same day that China sent its first civilian to space to release the Tiangong Space Station, “a much more mysterious mission on Earth,”
It was this vertical well in the middle of the desert. Specifically, in an oil -rich region through the earth’s crust that, according to the brief note of the State Xinhua news agency, was going to reach the Cretaceous layer. That is, rocks up to 145 million years old. To get an idea of their dimensions, oil polls usually descend between 1,000 and 1,600 meters. More than 5,000 meters is already something extraordinary. The 11 kilometers announced by the Beijing are brutality.
As they announced at that time, they hope to reach that depth in 457 days, but it has finally taken them longer. China began drilling in May 2023 and has extended for 580 days, of which more than half has corresponded to the last 910 meters. Despite this, he failed to beat the record and become the deepest well that man has excavated. There is one that came further.
On May 24, 1970, the Soviet Union began drilling a well in Pechanga, a scarcely populated district of the Murmansk region, in the northwestern corner of Russia. The works lasted until 1989 and reached 12,262 meters, a depth that man had never reached before or after. Not even China will dare to descend there, despite the fact that technology, engineering and current security measures are much more advanced than in the Soviet era.
The initial idea: 15,000 meters
That project was baptized as the ‘superprofundo well of Kola’. The idea was born in 1962 and the supervision was assigned to the Interdepartmental Scientific Council for the study of the Earth. The exact place of drilling was chosen in 1965, 10 kilometers from the city of Zapolyarny. The most surprising thing is that the initial objective that was set was to descend to 15,000 meters. The difference between this and other deep holes is that others were made to look for oil, while the Soviet, also known as SG-3, was made only to investigate the lithosphere.
The Chinese well will serve to test underground drilling machines and collect data on the interior of the earth, according to the first information. What is not so clear is what the long -term communist giant wants to get. The project is framed within the deep land exploration program announced by President Xi Jinping in 2021. The leader claimed that studies had to be carried out to identify energy resources, raw materials and evaluate the risks of natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
The president of the Illustrious Official College of Geologists (ICOG), Manuel Regueiro, told Isabel Miranda in ABC that she saw more plausible than the project was related to oil or the search for geothermal energy, indeed, because the heat that emanates from the nucleus of the earth is today a source within reach of few countries, such as Iceland, which due to its volcanic activity has high temperatures at almost surface levels of the subsoil. For the rest, however, reaching the 150 ºC necessary to move electric turbines is not so easy.
The cold war
To understand the Pozo of the USSR you have to locate the experiment in the years of the Cold War, times in which the space race between the Kremlin and the United States extended to any brand that could be achieved in the field of science. In terms of exploring the depths of the Earth, both powers began to organize their experiments in the 1950s, with the aim of reaching the discontinuity of Mohorovicic, the boundary between the cortex and the terrestrial mantle.
The United States took the initiative in 1958 with the launch of the Mohole Project. Located near the city of Guadalupe, in Mexico, the operation was carried out by a team of engineers that pierced, through the Pacific Ocean bed, a hole of a depth of more than 180 meters. Those responsible had considered that it was not viable on the surface of the earth, while in an open sea it was more feasible, for the simple reason that the mantle was much closer to the seabed. However, it was canceled in 1966 for its high cost.
He then touched the turn of the USSR, who got to work in 1970 with 15,000 meters on the horizon. At first they used Uralmash-4e drills and, subsequently, Uralmash-15000. Several wells were opened from a central branch, SG-3 being the deepest of all. At nine years after the work, on June 6, 1979, the depth record was broken, which was held by the Bertha Rogers well, in Washita County, United States, with 9,583 meters.
Eternal drilling
Four years later, in 1983, 12,000 meters deep were exceeded. At that time they stopped digging for a year so that several specialists and authorized personnel could visit that fascinating place. They resumed it in 1984, but at a much slower pace. However, on September 27, 1985, when they reached 12,066 meters, there was a terrible accident in which part of the well collapsed and 5,000 meters of earth were filled. That was a great disappointment, because they would have to drill again from 7,000 meters deep. Again they had to accelerate and, in 1989, they reached 12,262.
The optimism of those responsible shot. They were convinced that they would reach 13,500 meters at the end of 1990 and 15,000, in 1993, but as the drill was heading towards the center of the Earth and reached that record depth, there was a completely unexpected change. During the first 3,000 meters, temperatures inside the well had increased more or less to what the researchers expected, but then the heat level shot much faster. When the drilling began to approach the initial objective, the hole had heated at 185 ° C, twice what they had planned.
That was not all. The researchers also discovered that the rock to those depths was much less dense than they had imagined, which made a mass of mud and hydrogen continually flow in which it seemed impossible to work. As a result of these temperatures, the material found reacted from strange and unpredictable forms. Those responsible came to the conclusion that the team would not endure in these conditions, so they decided to paralyze it shortly before the fall of the USSR. They definitely closed it in 1995. The hole today remains sealed, without anyone having managed to overcome that brand.
Tiny fossils
Despite this, researchers could learn some fascinating things before sealing the ‘Superprofundo well of Kola’. For example, that about 6,400 meters deep there were tiny fossils of marine plants. These vegetable treasures were completely intact because of the time they had spent under several kilometers of rock. It is believed that they were more than two billion years old.
There was still a more impressive finding in the furthest confines of the hole. By measuring seismic waves, experts had previously predicted that the rock under our feet changes from granite to basalt about 3 or 6 kilometers below the surface, but they found that it was not so, at least in the Kola Peninsula. They only found granite, even at the deepest point of the well. Finally they discovered water that flowed several kilometers underground, at depths where no one predicted that it could exist. Although some of the most fantasy theories have pointed out that this discovery is the proof of biblical floods, it is believed to be a strong pressure that forces oxygen and hydrogen atoms to get out of the rock, to be then trapped in the form of water under the surface.
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