The Earth is so big that a person cannot measure it entirely in his entire lifetime. You can try reaching some parts, but if someone tells you what is inside the Earth? So perhaps you might think for a moment. It happened once in history when two world superpowers decided to open the deepest pit on Earth. This effort of Russia and America created an uproar in the world. Let us know in today’s story what happened after that.
America Had Success
The deepest well in the United States is the 32,000-foot (6 mi) deep Bertha Rogers gas well in Oklahoma. The work of the well was stopped due to a collision with molten sulphur. Perhaps the most famous attempt to pierce the Earth is Project Mohole (begun in 1961), an effort to drill through the Earth’s crust in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, where the crust is shallow.
Funds ran out in 1966, and the project was closed. The goal was to reach a discontinuity between the upper mantle and the Earth’s crust called the Mohorovicic discontinuity, commonly called the Moho. This project lagged far behind Moho. They reached only 601 feet below sea level in 12,000 feet of water. The Moho where they were digging was 16,000 feet deep, so the team fell well short of their goal.
Russia Had Dug The Deepest Well
The deepest crater ever discovered is on the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk in Russia, called the Kola Well. It was dug in 1970 for research purposes. After five years, the Kola well had reached 7 km (about 23,000 ft). Work continued until the project was shut down in 1989 because the drill became stuck in rock at a depth of slightly more than 12 km (about 40,000 feet or 8 miles). This is the current record for the depth reached by humans.
The depth of Kola’s well is equal to the distance across Jackson. This project costs more than $100 million, approximately $2500 per foot. That’s an expensive dig! Given the technology and money, geologists would like to go deeper for core samples, but digging such holes requires a lot of patience, money, technology and luck. A lot of information comes from such spots. For example, the bottom of this hole was about 370°F (190°C).
