During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had a startling plan: dig up the earth and see how deep it really is. However, this plan was interrupted when the excavation reached a depth of 12,262 meters.
Since then, there have been rumors in the Soviet Union and Russia that scientists have discovered the "Gates of Hell" during the excavation, and even circulated a recording of "The Gates of Hell in Russia for 40 seconds".
There seems to be some kind of mysterious connection between science and theology, but could it be that this Soviet excavation project really touched some mysterious force and was forced to terminate it?
In the struggle for hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War era, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, engaged in a covert contest in science and technology, military and other fields. When the Soviet Union was surpassed by the United States in space technology, the United States began to explore the interior of the earth again.
In 1961, the U.S. Congress passed the "Moho Face Drilling Program", marking the beginning of the United States' exploration of the Earth's interior. The Moho surface is the interface between the Earth's crust and mantle and is about 20-70 km deep on land, 7-8 km deep at the bottom of the ocean, and about 1 km deep at its shallowest point.
In the same year, the United States chose to drill at a relatively shallow ocean depth, officially launching the "Moho Face Drilling Program". However, due to the time-consuming, laborious and expensive nature of deep drilling, especially because of the high cost, the program was suspended by the US Congress in 1966 when drilling was only 315 meters down the seafloor at a depth of 948 meters.
The Soviet Union launched the Ground Access Program in 1970, and they wanted to teach the United States a profound lesson and show what real ground access technology is. They chose to carry out an ultra-difficult ground entry program on the Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk region in the far north of Russia, with the goal of digging through the earth.
This project came to be known as Kola Ultra Deep Well or Kola Ultra Deep Drilling. In order to achieve this goal, the Soviet Union invested a lot of human, material and financial resources, and attracted many elite-level scientific researchers with favorable treatment.
According to reports, the Soviet Union offered a monthly salary package for researchers on this project to be the annual salary of a university professor, and also provided each researcher with a high-end apartment in Moscow.
These attractive treatments attract many scientific elites. In order to ensure the smooth running of the program, the Soviet Union also set up 16 scientific laboratories dedicated to the exploration and study of rock formations.
Due to the sophistication of drilling technology in the Soviet Union, the excavation went very smoothly in the beginning.
When the excavation was 7,000 meters underground, it encountered a layer of hard rock, which led to a challenge in the excavation process. However, the Soviets had 16 research laboratories dedicated to dealing with rock formations to provide technical support, and the problem was quickly resolved.
After continuous efforts, the drilling team successfully broke through the 7,000-meter mark. However, the layered rock layer, although less hard, can cause the drill string to get stuck with irregular holes inside, and the drill bit can also fall during lifting, which makes the drilling work slow.
Nevertheless, the Soviets did not give up and insisted on drilling down slowly. Finally, in 1979, the depth of drilling reached 9,583 meters, tying the world record at the time.
Prior to this, the Rogers Drill Hole in the United States reached a depth of 9,583 meters in 1976, becoming the deepest hole in the world at the time, and the Soviet Union's Kola Ultra Deep Drill equaled this record in 1979.
In 1983, the ultra-deep hole in Kola, Soviet Union, was drilled to a depth of 12,066 meters, but scientists on the project were distracted by the project's efforts to attend the International Geological Congress held in Moscow in 1984.
Soon after the resumption of excavation, the approximately 5,000-meter-long drill string was stuck at depth and could not be removed, and the researchers had to continue digging from 7,000 meters. By 1989, the depth of the hole had again reached about 120,000 meters, which is expected to reach about 1 in 199150,000 meters.
However, the political turmoil in the Soviet Union led to the slow progress of the excavations.
In 1991, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia declared their independence, and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. At the end of the year, the top leader of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced his resignation, and the Soviet Union officially collapsed.
The Soviet Union's plan to dig through the earth and build an Earth telescope came to a standstill. By the beginning of 1992, Kola had reached a depth of 12,262 meters, and then this number was permanently maintained, and most of the scientists and staff were withdrawn.
Although Russia inherited the Kola ultra-deep drilling, due to the economic downturn at that time, it did not continue to increase investment, but only retained part of the project funds left over from the Soviet Union and a small number of scientific researchers and staff to continue to engage in research.
In 2006, all the funds for the ultra-deep drilling left over from the Soviet Union were exhausted, and the scientific research program was completely stopped.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the scientists and staff were evacuated from the Kola Peninsula, leaving only a few to continue their research in the laboratory.
After the Russian Northern Fleet took over, it sealed the 12,262-meter-long ultra-deep hole in Kola with a steel manhole cover weighing 12 tons. The incident has sparked speculation among the people, and some people believe that the researchers encountered a mysterious incident and stopped drilling;It is also claimed that when drilling to 12,262 meters, it encountered the gates of hell, triggering an unknown force and causing the project to be terminated.
The audio of the gates of hell in Russia was rumored to last only 40 seconds, and scientists discovered a huge cave during the excavation, but repeated explorations failed to obtain useful information.
They placed a heat-resistant recording device, and the result was a human scream of pain, which the audience believed to be the call of a tormented soul in hell.
It was even said that the Korra ultra-deep drill hole spewed out blue flames, known as hellfire, and was therefore sealed by the military with a 12-ton manhole cover. These legends make people feel as mysterious as myths in the ultra-deep hole of Kora, but in reality, these are all online rumors.
The Kola ultra-deep drilling was halted after excavation reached 12,262 metres, mainly due to technical and economic issues.
The Kola ultra-deep drilling is a Soviet-era scientific research project aimed at the structure and properties of the Earth's interior. However, due to technical issues, many difficulties were encountered during the drilling process.
As the depth increases, the temperature also rises, reaching more than 360 degrees Celsius, which makes the drill bit wear and tear in extremely high temperature environments, and the drill rig also generates huge high temperatures when drilling.
In this case, frequent replacement of the drill bit becomes the only way, but it also comes with a huge financial burden, as replacing the drill bit requires money and manual operation, and the workload of the staff will also be very large.
In addition, as the depth increases, drilling progresses slowly, consuming a lot of time and manpower, ultimately resulting in the project becoming very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly, and is considered a cash burn.
Against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia's economic difficulties, this scientific research project, which did not bring much benefit to reality, was suspended.
Although the Kola ultra-deep hole was only drilled to 12,262 meters, it has already refreshed our understanding of material deep underground. Researchers in the Kola ultra-deep drilling hole found that at a depth of 9,500 meters underground, there is a section of geological layer that contains rich gold content, with a gold content of 80 grams per ton, and according to international standards, it can be mined with a gold content of 4 grams per ton, so the gold content of this geological layer is very rich.
This proves that the deeper the subsurface, the more gold is abundant. However, due to funding and other factors, the Kola ultra-deep drilling program was terminated in 2006. Korra's ultra-deep drill hole has nothing to do with the gates of hell, and while it may surprise some foreign netizens, it also proves that people's imagination is limitless.