It is no easier to penetrate into the secrets that are under our feet than to find out all the secrets of the Universe above our heads. And maybe even more difficult, because in order to look into the depths of the Earth, you need very deep well.
The purposes of drilling are different (oil production, for example), but ultra-deep (more than 6 km) wells are primarily needed by scientists who want to know what interesting things there are inside our planet. Where these “windows” to the center of the Earth are located and what the deepest drilled well is called, we will tell you in this article. First just one clarification.
Drilling can be done either vertically downwards or at an angle to the surface of the earth. In the second case, the length can be very large, but the depth, if assessed from the mouth (the beginning of the well on the surface) to the deepest point in the subsurface, is less than that of those that run perpendicularly.
An example is one of the wells of the Chayvinskoye field, the length of which reached 12,700 m, but in depth it is significantly inferior to the deepest wells.
This well, 7520 m deep, is located on the territory of modern Western Ukraine. However, work on it was carried out back in the USSR in 1975 - 1982.
The purpose of creating this one of the deepest wells in the USSR was the extraction of minerals (oil and gas), but the study of the bowels of the earth was also an important task.
9 Yen-Yakhinskaya well
Not far from the city of Novy Urengoy in the Yamalo-Nenets District. The purpose of drilling the Earth was to determine the composition earth's crust at the drilling site and determine the profitability of developing large depths for mining.
As is usually the case with ultra-deep wells, the subsurface presented the researchers with many “surprises.” For example, at a depth of about 4 km the temperature reached +125 (above the calculated one), and after another 3 km the temperature was already +210 degrees. Nevertheless, the scientists completed their research, and in 2006 the well was abandoned.
8 Saatli in Azerbaijan
In the USSR, one of the deepest wells in the world, Saatli, was drilled on the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. It was planned to bring its depth to 11 km and conduct various studies related to both the structure of the earth’s crust and the development of oil at different depths.
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However, it was not possible to drill such a deep well, as happens very, very often. During operation, machines often fail due to extremely high temperatures and pressures; the well is bent because the hardness of different rocks is not uniform; Often a minor breakdown entails such problems that solving them requires more money than creating a new one.
So in in this case, despite the fact that the materials obtained as a result of drilling were very valuable, work had to be stopped at around 8324 m.
7 Zisterdorf - the deepest in Austria
Another deep well was drilled in Austria, near the town of Zisterdorf. There were gas and oil fields nearby, and geologists hoped that an ultra-deep well would make it possible to obtain super-profits in the field of mining.
Indeed, at a very significant depth it was discovered natural gas– to the despair of specialists, it was impossible to remove it. Further drilling ended in an accident; the walls of the well collapsed.
There was no point in restoring it; they decided to drill another nearby, but nothing interesting for industrialists could be found in it.
6 Universities in the USA
One of the deepest wells on Earth is University in the USA. Its depth is 8686 m. The materials obtained as a result of drilling are of significant interest, as they provide new material about the structure of the planet on which we live.
Surprisingly, as a result, it turned out that it was not the scientists who were right, but the science fiction writers: in the depths there are layers of minerals, and life exists at great depths - however, we're talking about about bacteria!
In the 90s, Germany began drilling the ultra-deep Hauptborung well. It was planned to bring its depth to 12 km, but, as is usually the case with ultra-deep mines, the plans were not crowned with success. Already at just over 7 meters, problems with the machines began: drilling vertically down became impossible, and the shaft began to deviate more and more to the side. Every meter was difficult, and the temperature rose extremely.
Finally, when the heat reached 270 degrees, and endless accidents and failures exhausted everyone, it was decided to suspend work. This occurred at a depth of 9.1 km, making the Hauptborung well one of the deepest.
The scientific materials obtained from the drilling have become the basis for thousands of studies, and the mine itself is currently used for tourism purposes.
4 Baden Unit
In the United States, Lone Star attempted to drill an ultra-deep well in 1970. The location near the city of Anadarko in Oklahoma was not chosen by chance: here wild nature and high scientific potential create a convenient opportunity for both drilling a well and studying it.
The work was carried out for more than a year, and during this time they drilled to a depth of 9159 m, which allows it to be included among the deepest mines in the world.
And finally, we present the three deepest wells in the world. In third place is Bertha Rogers - the world's first ultra-deep well, which, however, did not remain the deepest for long. Only a short time later, the deepest well in the USSR, the Kola well, appeared.
Bertha Rogers was drilled by GHK, a company that develops mineral resources, primarily natural gas. The goal of the work was to search for gas in great depth. Work began in 1970, when earth's bowels ah, very little was known.
The company had high hopes for the site in Ouachita County, because Oklahoma has a lot of mineral resources, and at that time scientists thought that there were entire layers of oil and gas in the earth. However, 500 days of work and huge funds invested in the project turned out to be useless: the drill melted in a layer of liquid sulfur, and gas or oil could not be detected.
In addition, during drilling no Scientific research, since the well was only of commercial importance.
2 KTB-Oberpfalz
In second place in our ranking is the German Oberpfalz well, which reached a depth of almost 10 km.
This mine holds the record for the deepest vertical well, since without deviations to the side it goes to a depth of 7500 m! This is an unprecedented figure, because mines at great depths inevitably bend, but the unique equipment used by scientists from Germany made it possible to move the drill vertically downwards for a very long time.
The difference in diameter is not that great either. Ultra-deep wells start on the surface of the earth with a hole with a fairly large diameter (at Oberpfalz - 71 cm), and then gradually narrow. At the bottom, the German well has a diameter of only about 16 cm.
The reason why work had to be stopped is the same as in all other cases - equipment failure due to high temperatures.
1 The Kola well is the deepest in the world
We owe the stupid legend to a “duck” spread in the Western press, where, with reference to the mythical “world-famous scientist” Azzakov, they talked about a “creature” that escaped from a mine, the temperature in which reached 1000 degrees, about the groans of millions of people who signed up for microphone down and so on.
At first glance, it is clear that the story is sewn with white thread (and, by the way, it was published on April Fool’s Day): the temperature in the mine was no higher than 220 degrees, however, at this temperature, as well as at 1000 degrees, no microphone can work ; the creatures did not escape, and the named scientist does not exist.
The Kola well is the deepest in the world. Its depth reaches 12262 m, which significantly exceeds the depth of other mines. But not the length! Now we can call it by at least three wells - Qatar, Sakhalin-1 and one of the wells of the Chayvinskoye field (Z-42) - which are longer, but not deeper.
Kola gave scientists colossal material, which has not yet been fully processed and comprehended.
| Place | Name | A country | Depth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kola | USSR | 12262 |
| 2 | KTB-Oberpfalz | Germany | 9900 |
| 3 | USA | 9583 | |
| 4 | Baden-Unit | USA | 9159 |
| 5 | Germany | 9100 | |
| 6 | USA | 8686 | |
| 7 | Zisterdorf | Austria | 8553 |
| 8 | USSR (modern Azerbaijan) | 8324 | |
| 9 | Russia | 8250 | |
| 10 | Shevchenkovskaya | USSR (Ukraine) | 7520 |
"Dr. Huberman, what the hell did you dig up down there?" - a remark from the audience interrupted the report of a Russian scientist at a UNESCO meeting in Australia. A couple of weeks earlier, in April 1995, a wave of reports about a mysterious accident at the Kola superdeep well swept across the world.
Allegedly, on approaching the 13th kilometer, the instruments recorded a strange noise coming from the bowels of the planet - the yellow newspapers unanimously assured that only the cries of sinners from the underworld could sound like that. A few seconds after the terrible sound appeared, an explosion occurred...
Space under your feet
In the late 70s - early 80s, getting a job at the Kola Superdeep Well, as residents of the village of Zapolyarny in the Murmansk Region affectionately call the well, was more difficult than getting into the cosmonaut corps. Out of hundreds of applicants, one or two were chosen. Along with the employment order, the lucky ones received a separate apartment and a salary equal to double or triple the salary of Moscow professors. There were 16 research laboratories operating at the well simultaneously, each the size of an average factory. Only the Germans dug the earth with such tenacity, but, as the Guinness Book of Records testifies, the deepest German well is almost half as long as ours.
Distant galaxies have been studied by humanity much better than what is located under the earth’s crust a few kilometers away from us. Kola Superdeep - a kind of telescope in the mysterious inner world planets.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, it was believed that the Earth consists of a crust, mantle and core. At the same time, no one could really say where one layer ends and the next begins. Scientists did not even know what these layers actually consist of. Some 40 years ago they were sure that the granite layer begins at a depth of 50 meters and continues up to 3 kilometers, and then there are basalts. The mantle was expected to be encountered at a depth of 15–18 kilometers. In reality, everything turned out completely different. And although school textbooks still write that the Earth consists of three layers, scientists from the Kola Superdeep Site have proven that this is not so.
Baltic shield
Projects for traveling deep into the Earth appeared in the early 60s in several countries at once. They tried to drill wells in places where the crust should have been thinner - the goal was to reach the mantle. For example, the Americans drilled in the area of the island of Maui, Hawaii, where, according to seismic studies, ancient rocks emerge under the ocean floor and the mantle is located at a depth of approximately 5 kilometers under a four-kilometer layer of water. Alas, not a single ocean drilling site has penetrated deeper than 3 kilometers. In general, almost all projects of ultra-deep wells mysteriously ended at a depth of three kilometers. It was at this moment that something strange began to happen to the drills: either they found themselves in unexpected super-hot areas, or as if they were being bitten off by some unprecedented monster. Only 5 wells broke through deeper than 3 kilometers, 4 of which were Soviet. And only the Kola Superdeep was destined to overcome the 7-kilometer mark.
Initial domestic projects also involved underwater drilling - in the Caspian Sea or on Lake Baikal. But in 1963, drilling scientist Nikolai Timofeev convinced State Committee according to science and technology of the USSR is that it is necessary to create a well on the continent. Although it would take much longer to drill, he believed, the well would be much more valuable with scientific point view, because it was in the thickness of the continental plates that the most significant movements of earth rocks took place in prehistoric times. The drilling point was not chosen on the Kola Peninsula by chance. The peninsula is located on the so-called Baltic Shield, which is composed of the most ancient known to mankind breeds
A multi-kilometer section of the layers of the Baltic Shield is a visual history of the planet over the past 3 billion years.
Conqueror of the Depths
The appearance of the Kola drilling rig can disappoint the average person. The well is not like the mine that our imagination pictures. There are no descents underground, only a drill with a diameter of a little more than 20 centimeters goes into the thickness. The imaginary section of the Kola superdeep well looks like a tiny needle piercing the earth's thickness. A drill with numerous sensors, located at the end of a needle, is raised and lowered over several days. You can’t go faster: the strongest composite cable can break under its own weight.
What happens in the depths is not known for certain. Temperature environment, noise and other parameters are transmitted upward with a minute delay. However, drillers say that even such contact with the underground can be seriously frightening. The sounds coming from below really look like screams and howls. To this we can add a long list of accidents that plagued the Kola Superdeep when it reached a depth of 10 kilometers. Twice the drill was taken out melted, although the temperatures at which it can melt are comparable to the temperature of the surface of the Sun. One day, it was as if the cable had been pulled from below and was torn off. Subsequently, when they drilled in the same place, no remains of the cable were found. What caused these and many other accidents still remains a mystery. However, they were not the reason for stopping drilling in the Baltic Shield.
12,000 meters of discoveries and a little devilry
“We have the deepest hole in the world - so we must use it!” - David Guberman, the permanent director of the Kola Superdeep Research and Production Center, exclaims bitterly. In the first 30 years of the Kola Superdeep, Soviet and then Russian scientists broke through to a depth of 12,262 meters. But since 1995, drilling has been stopped: there was no one to finance the project. What stands out within scientific programs UNESCO is only enough to maintain the drilling station in working condition and study previously extracted rock samples.
Huberman recalls with regret how many scientific discoveries took place on the Kola Superdeep. Literally every meter was a revelation. The well showed that almost all of our previous knowledge about the structure of the earth's crust is incorrect. It turned out that the Earth is not at all like layered cake. “Up to 4 kilometers everything went according to theory, and then the end of the world began,” says Huberman. Theorists promised that the temperature of the Baltic Shield would remain relatively low to a depth of at least 15 kilometers. Accordingly, it will be possible to dig a well up to almost 20 kilometers, just up to the mantle. But already at 5 kilometers the ambient temperature exceeded 700C, at seven - over 1200C, and at a depth of 12 it was hotter than 2200C - 1000C higher than predicted. Kola drillers questioned the theory of the layered structure of the earth's crust - at least in the interval up to 12,262 meters. At school we were taught: there are young rocks, granites, basalts, mantle and core. But the granites turned out to be 3 kilometers lower than expected. Next there should have been basalts. They weren't found at all. All drilling took place in the granite layer. This is a very important discovery, because all our ideas about the origin and distribution of minerals are connected with the theory of the layered structure of the Earth.
Another surprise: life on planet Earth turns out to have arisen 1.5 billion years earlier than expected. At depths where it was believed that there was no organic matter, 14 species of fossilized microorganisms were discovered - the age of the deep layers exceeded 2.8 billion years. At even greater depths, where there are no longer sediments, methane appeared in huge concentrations. This completely and completely destroyed the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons such as oil and gas
There were almost fantastic sensations. When in the late 70s the Soviet automatic space station brought 124 grams of lunar soil to Earth, Kola researchers scientific center They found that it is exactly like samples from a depth of 3 kilometers. And a hypothesis arose: the Moon broke away from the Kola Peninsula. Now they are looking for where exactly.
The history of the Kola Superdeep is not without mysticism. Officially, as already mentioned, the well stopped due to lack of funds. Coincidence or not - but it was in that year 1995 that a sound was heard in the depths of the mine. powerful explosion of unknown nature. Journalists from a Finnish newspaper broke through to the residents of Zapolyarny - and the world was shocked by the story of a demon flying out of the bowels of the planet.
"When I talk about this mysterious story They started asking questions at UNESCO, I didn’t know what to answer. On the one hand, it's bullshit. On the other hand, I, as an honest scientist, could not say that I know what exactly happened to us. A very strange noise was recorded, then there was an explosion... A few days later, nothing like that was found at the same depth,” recalls academician David Guberman.
Quite unexpectedly for everyone, Alexei Tolstoy’s predictions from the novel “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid” were confirmed. At a depth of over 9.5 kilometers, a real treasure trove of all kinds of minerals, in particular gold, was discovered. A real olivine belt, brilliantly predicted by the writer. It contains 78 grams of gold per ton. By the way, industrial production is possible at a concentration of 34 grams per ton. Perhaps in the near future humanity will be able to take advantage of this wealth.
At a depth of 410-660 kilometers below the surface of the Earth, there is an ocean of the Archean period. Such discoveries would not have been possible without the ultra-deep drilling methods developed and used in the Soviet Union. One of the artifacts of those times is the Kola superdeep well (SG-3), which, even 24 years after the cessation of drilling, remains the deepest in the world. Why it was drilled and what discoveries it helped make, says Lenta.ru.
Pioneers ultra-deep drilling The Americans spoke. True, in the vastness of the ocean: in the pilot project they used the Glomar Challenger vessel, designed precisely for these purposes. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was actively developing an appropriate theoretical framework.
In May 1970, in the north of the Murmansk region, 10 kilometers from the city of Zapolyarny, drilling of the Kola superdeep well began. As expected, this was timed to coincide with the centenary of Lenin’s birth. Unlike other ultra-deep wells, SG-3 was drilled exclusively for scientific purposes and even organized a special geological exploration expedition.
The drilling location chosen was unique: it is on the Baltic Shield in the Kola Peninsula area that ancient rocks come to the surface. The age of many of them reaches three billion years (our planet itself is 4.5 billion years old). In addition, there is the Pechenga-Imandra-Varzuga rift trough - a cup-like structure pressed into ancient rocks, the origin of which is explained by a deep fault.
It took scientists four years to drill a well to a depth of 7263 meters. So far, nothing unusual has been done: the same installation was used as for oil and gas production. Then the well stood idle for a whole year: the installation was modified for turbine drilling. After the upgrade, it was possible to drill approximately 60 meters per month.
The depth of seven kilometers brought surprises: alternation of hard and not very dense rocks. Accidents became more frequent, and many cavities appeared in the wellbore. Drilling continued until 1983, when the depth of SG-3 reached 12 kilometers. After this, scientists collected big conference and talked about their successes.
However, due to careless handling with the drill, a five-kilometer-long section remained in the mine. They tried to get her for several months, but were unsuccessful. It was decided to start drilling again from a depth of seven kilometers. Due to the complexity of the operation, not only the main trunk was drilled, but also four additional ones. It took six years to restore the lost meters: in 1990, the well reached a depth of 12,262 meters, becoming the deepest in the world.
Two years later, drilling was stopped, the well was subsequently mothballed, and in fact abandoned.
Nevertheless, many discoveries were made at the Kola superdeep well. Engineers have created an entire system of ultra-deep drilling. The difficulty lay not only in depth, but also in high temperatures(up to 200 degrees Celsius) due to the intensity of the drills.
Scientists not only moved deeper into the Earth, but also lifted rock samples and cores for analysis. By the way, it was they who studied the lunar soil and found that its composition almost completely corresponds to the rocks extracted from the Kola well from a depth of about three kilometers.
At a depth of over nine kilometers they came across deposits of minerals, including gold: in the olivine layer there is as much as 78 grams per ton. And this is not so little - gold mining is considered possible at 34 grams per ton. A pleasant surprise for scientists, as well as for the nearby plant, was the discovery of a new ore horizon of copper-nickel ores.
Among other things, the researchers learned that granites do not transform into a super-strong basalt layer: in fact, behind it were Archean gneisses, which are traditionally classified as fractured rocks. This produced a kind of revolution in geological and geophysical science and completely changed traditional ideas about the interior of the Earth.
Another pleasant surprise is the discovery at a depth of 9-12 kilometers of highly porous fractured rocks, saturated with highly mineralized waters. According to scientists, they are responsible for the formation of ores, but previously it was believed that this occurs only at much shallower depths.
Among other things, it turned out that the temperature of the subsoil was slightly higher than expected: at a depth of six kilometers, a temperature gradient of 20 degrees Celsius per kilometer was obtained instead of the 16 expected. The radiogenic origin of the heat flow was established, which also did not agree with previous hypotheses.
In deep layers more than 2.8 billion years old, scientists have found 14 species of fossilized microorganisms. This made it possible to shift the time of the emergence of life on the planet one and a half billion years ago. The researchers also found that at depths there are no sedimentary rocks and there is methane, forever burying the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons.
In the USSR they loved scale, and more, and this extended to literally everything. So one well was dug in the Union, which even today bears the title of the deepest on earth. It is noteworthy that the well was not drilled for oil production or geological exploration, but purely for scientific research.
Tips used to drill a well.
The Kola Superdeep Well, or SG-3, is the deepest well in the earth made by man. Located in the Murmansk region, 10 kilometers from the city of Zapolyarny, in westward. The depth of the hole is 12,262 meters. Its diameter at the top is 92 centimeters. At the bottom - 21.5 centimeters. Important feature SG-3 is that, unlike any other wells for oil production or geological work, this one was drilled solely for scientific purposes.
The well was laid in 1970, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin. The location chosen is notable because the well was drilled into outcropping volcanic rocks more than 3 billion years old. By the way, the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. When extracting minerals, wells are rarely drilled deeper than two thousand meters.
The work went on for days on end.
Drilling began on May 24, 1970. Up to the level of 7 thousand meters, drilling proceeded easily and calmly, but after the head hit less dense rocks, problems began. The process has slowed down significantly. Only on June 6, 1979 was it delivered new record- 9583 meters. It was previously installed in the US by oil producers. The mark of 12,066 meters was passed in 1983. The result was achieved by the International Geological Congress, which was held in Moscow. Subsequently, two accidents occurred at the complex.
Now the complex looks like this.
In 1997, several legends were circulated in the media that the Kola superdeep well was real road in hell. One of these legends said that when the team lowered a microphone to a depth of several thousand meters, human screams, moans and screams were heard there.
Of course, there was nothing like that. If only because special equipment is used to record sound in a well at such a depth - but it did not record anything. Several accidents actually occurred at the complex, including an underground explosion during drilling, but geologists certainly did not disturb any underground “demons.”
The well itself is mothballed.
What is really important is that SG-3 had 16 research laboratories. During times Soviet Union domestic geologists were able to make many valuable discoveries and better understand how our planet works. Work at the site allowed us to significantly improve drilling technology. Scientists were also able to understand the local geological processes, received comprehensive data about thermal mode subsoil, underground gases and deep waters.
Unfortunately, today the Kola superdeep well is closed. The complex building has been deteriorating since the last laboratory here was closed in 2008 and all equipment was dismantled. The reason is simple - lack of funding. In 2010, the well was already mothballed. Now it is slowly but surely being destroyed under the influence of natural processes.
The Kola superdeep well is the deepest borehole in the world (from 1979 to 2008). It is located in the Murmansk region, 10 kilometers west of the city of Zapolyarny, on the territory of the geological Baltic shield. Its depth is 12,262 meters. Unlike other ultra-deep wells that were made for oil production or geological exploration, SG-3 was drilled solely to study the lithosphere in the area where the Mohorovicic boundary is. (abbreviated Moho boundary) - bottom line the earth's crust, on which there is an abrupt increase in the velocities of longitudinal seismic waves.
The Kola superdeep well was laid in honor of the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, in 1970. Sedimentary rock strata by that time had been well studied during oil production. It was more interesting to drill where volcanic rocks about 3 billion years old (for comparison: the age of the Earth is estimated at 4.5 billion years) come to the surface. To extract minerals, such rocks are rarely drilled deeper than 1-2 km. It was assumed that already at a depth of 5 km the granite layer would be replaced by a basalt one. On June 6, 1979, the well broke the record of 9583 meters, previously held by the Bertha-Rogers well (an oil well in Oklahoma). IN best years 16 research laboratories worked at the Kola superdeep well, they were personally supervised by the Minister of Geology of the USSR.
Although it was expected that a clear boundary between granites and basalts would be discovered, only granites were found in the core throughout the depth. However, due to high pressure compressed granites greatly changed their physical and acoustic properties. As a rule, the lifted core crumbled from active gas release into slurry, since it could not withstand a sharp change in pressure. It was possible to remove a strong piece of core only with a very slow lifting of the drill, when the “excess” gas, still pressed to high pressure, managed to escape from the rock. The density of cracks at great depths, contrary to expectations, increased. There was also water at depth that filled the cracks.
It is interesting that when the International Geological Congress was held in Moscow in 1984, at which the first results of research on the well were presented, many scientists jokingly proposed to immediately bury it, since it destroys all ideas about the structure of the earth’s crust. Indeed, strange things began even in the first stages of penetration. For example, theorists, even before the start of drilling, promised that the temperature of the Baltic shield would remain relatively low to a depth of at least 5 kilometers, the ambient temperature exceeded 70 degrees Celsius, at seven - over 120 degrees, and at a depth of 12 it was hot stronger than 220 degrees - 100 degrees higher than predicted. Kola drillers questioned the theory of the layered structure of the earth's crust - at least in the interval up to 12,262 meters.
“We have the deepest hole in the world - so we must use it!” - David Guberman, the permanent director of the Kola Superdeep Research and Production Center, exclaims bitterly. In the first 30 years of the Kola Superdeep, Soviet and then Russian scientists broke through to a depth of 12,262 meters. But since 1995, drilling has been stopped: there was no one to finance the project. What is allocated within the framework of UNESCO's scientific programs is only enough to maintain the drilling station in working condition and study previously extracted rock samples.
Huberman recalls with regret how many scientific discoveries took place at the Kola Superdeep. Literally every meter was a revelation. The well showed that almost all of our previous knowledge about the structure of the earth's crust is incorrect. It turned out that the Earth is not at all like a layer cake.
Another surprise: life on planet Earth turns out to have arisen 1.5 billion years earlier than expected. At depths where it was believed that there was no organic matter, 14 species of fossilized microorganisms were discovered - the age of the deep layers exceeded 2.8 billion years. At even greater depths, where there are no longer sediments, methane appeared in huge concentrations. This completely and completely destroyed the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons such as oil and gas. There were almost fantastic sensations. When, in the late 70s, the Soviet automatic space station brought 124 grams of lunar soil to Earth, researchers at the Kola Science Center found that it was like two peas in a pod to samples from a depth of 3 kilometers. And a hypothesis arose: the Moon broke away from the Kola Peninsula. Now they are looking for where exactly. By the way, the Americans, who brought half a ton of soil from the Moon, did nothing meaningful with it. They were placed in airtight containers and left for research by future generations.
Quite unexpectedly for everyone, Alexei Tolstoy’s predictions from the novel “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid” were confirmed. At a depth of over 9.5 kilometers, a real treasure trove of all kinds of minerals, in particular gold, was discovered. A real olivine layer, brilliantly predicted by the writer. It contains 78 grams of gold per ton. By the way, industrial production is possible at a concentration of 34 grams per ton. But, what is most surprising, at even greater depths, where there are no longer sedimentary rocks, natural methane gas was found in huge concentrations. This completely and completely destroyed the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons such as oil and gas
Not only scientific sensations, but also mysterious legends were also associated with the Kola well. most of of which, when tested, turned out to be fabrications of journalists. According to one of them, the primary source of information (1989) was the American television company Trinity Broadcasting Network, which, in turn, took the story from a report by a Finnish newspaper. Allegedly, when drilling a well, at a depth of 12 thousand meters, the scientists' microphones recorded screams and moans.) Journalists, without even thinking that it was simply impossible to insert a microphone to such a depth (what kind of sound recording device can work at temperatures above two hundred degrees?) wrote that the drillers heard a “voice from the underworld.”
After these publications, Kola ultra-deep well they began to call it “the road to hell,” claiming that every new kilometer drilled brought misfortune to the country. They said that when the drillers were excavating thirteen thousand meters, the USSR collapsed. Well, when the well was drilled to a depth of 14.5 km (which actually did not happen), they suddenly came across unusual voids. Intrigued by this unexpected discovery, drillers lowered a microphone there that can operate at extremely high temperatures and other sensors. The temperature inside allegedly reached 1,100 °C - there was the heat of fiery chambers, in which human screams could allegedly be heard.
This legend still roams the vast expanses of the Internet, having outlived the very culprit of these gossips - the Kola well. Work on it was stopped back in 1992 due to lack of funding. Until 2008, it was in a mothballed state. A year later, the final decision was made to abandon the continuation of research and to dismantle the entire research complex and “bury” the well. The final abandonment of the well occurred in the summer of 2011.
So, as you can see, this time scientists were not able to get to the mantle and examine it. However, this does not mean that the Kola well did not give anything to science - on the contrary, it turned all their ideas about the structure of the earth’s crust upside down.
RESULTS
The objectives set in the ultra-deep drilling project have been completed. Special equipment and technology for ultra-deep drilling, as well as for studying wells drilled to great depths, have been developed and created. We received information, one might say, “first hand” about physical condition, properties and composition of rocks in their natural occurrence and from core to a depth of 12,262 m. Great gift homeland, the well produced water at shallow depths - in the range of 1.6-1.8 km. Industrial copper-nickel ores were opened there - a new ore horizon was discovered. And it comes in handy, because the local nickel plant is already running short of ore.
As noted above, the geological forecast of the well section did not come true. The picture that was expected during the first 5 km in the well extended for 7 km, and then completely unexpected rocks appeared. The basalts predicted at a depth of 7 km were not found, even when they dropped to 12 km. It was expected that the boundary that gives the greatest reflection during seismic sounding is the level where the granites transform into a more durable basalt layer. In reality, it turned out that less strong and less dense fractured rocks are located there - Archean gneisses. This was never expected. And this is fundamentally new geological and geophysical information, which allows us to interpret the data of deep geophysical research differently.
The data on the process of ore formation in the deep layers of the earth’s crust also turned out to be unexpected and fundamentally new. Thus, at depths of 9-12 km, highly porous fractured rocks were encountered, saturated with highly mineralized underground waters. These waters are one of the sources of ore formation. Previously, it was believed that this was possible only at much shallower depths. It was in this interval that the core was found increased content gold - up to 1 g per 1 ton of rock (a concentration that is considered suitable for industrial development). But will it ever be profitable to mine gold from such depths?
Ideas about the thermal regime of the earth's interior and the deep distribution of temperatures in areas of basalt shields have also changed. At a depth of more than 6 km, a temperature gradient of 20°C per 1 km was obtained instead of the expected (as in the upper part) 16°C per 1 km. It was revealed that half of the heat flow is of radiogenic origin.
The depths of the earth contain as many mysteries as the vast expanses of the Universe. This is exactly what some scientists think, and they are partly right, because people still don’t know exactly what is under our feet, deep underground. Over the entire existence of earthly civilization, we have been able to go deeper into the planet a little more than 10 kilometers. This record was set back in 1990 and lasted until 2008, after which it was updated several times. In 2008, Maersk Oil BD-04A, a 12,290 meter long inclined oil well, was drilled (Al Shaheen oil basin in Qatar). In January 2011, an inclined oil well with a depth of 12,345 meters was drilled at the Odoptu-Sea field (Sakhalin-1 project). Drilling depth record for this moment belongs to the Z-42 well of the Chayvinskoye field, the depth of which is 12,700 meters.
