Uncovering Earth’s Secrets: A Journey Into Its Deepest Hole
We all know about the Space Race, when the United States and the Soviet Union battled it out to become the world’s leading power in extra-terrestrial exploration. What’s less discussed, though, is the race to explore the depths of our own planet. While the U.S. is widely said to have won the Space Race, it was the Soviets who emerged victorious in this other battle. It was they who created the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever drilled.
Project Mohole
The Americans started this race to the bottom towards the end of the 1950s with the launch of Project Mohole. This was a plan to drill through the seafloor off the coast of Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, in order to reach the mantle of the Earth to take a sample.
The project was undoubtedly an ambitious one, but it faced a lot of obstacles. Drilling underwater is no easy task, and it required engineers to get creative in order to find a solution.
Dynamic positioning
One problem the experts faced when planning for this underwater drilling effort was the prospect of the vessel housing the drill spinning out of control. That could have been disastrous, but an innovative concept called “dynamic positioning” was employed to deal with the issue.
Basically, propellers facing in the opposite direction to the rotation of the drill were fixed to the hull of the vessel; these were switched on while boring was being carried out to stop the craft spinning. That meant the ship could stay in position over the hole.
A footnote in history
By 1961 Project Mohole had succeeded in boring a hole of 601 feet in depth at a depth of 11,700 feet below sea level. In another reality, that would have marked only the start of the project’s achievements, but, as things really played out, it was — ironically — its high point.
Project Mohole soon succumbed to the realities of American politics. Congress cut off the initiative’s funding in 1966 following a period of internal disagreement about what the goals of the project actually were. The whole thing is just a footnote in history now.
An enduring record
The Soviet attempt came after all this, in 1970. They started drilling in an area of Russia called Murmansk, which isn’t far from the border with Norway. Their project was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, though it actually consisted of several holes rather than just one.
It’s one of these holes — one known as SG-3 — that’s considered to be the deepest ever to be drilled. It cut deeper into the Earth’s crust than any other attempt in history, and its record remains in place today.