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.
The Americans were the pioneers of ultra-deep drilling. 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, the scientists gathered a large conference and talked about their successes.
However, due to careless handling of 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 the depth, but also in the 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 1970, right on Lenin’s 100th birthday, Soviet scientists began one of the most ambitious projects of our time. On the Kola Peninsula, ten kilometers from the village of Zapolyarny, drilling of a well began, which as a result turned out to be the deepest in the world and entered the Guinness Book of Records.
The grandiose scientific project has been going on for more than twenty years. It brought a lot of interesting discoveries, went down in the history of science, and in the end acquired so many legends, rumors and gossip that it would be enough for more than one horror film.
THE USSR. Kola Peninsula. October 1, 1980. Advanced well drillers that reached a record depth of 10,500 meters
Entrance to hell
During its heyday, the drilling site on the Kola Peninsula was a cyclopean structure the height of a 20-story building. Up to three thousand people worked here per shift. The team was led by the country's leading geologists. The drilling rig was built in the tundra ten kilometers from the village of Zapolyarny, and in the polar night it shone with lights like a spaceship.
When all this splendor suddenly closed and the lights went out, rumors immediately began to spread. By any measure, the drilling was extraordinarily successful. No one in the world has ever managed to reach such a depth - Soviet geologists lowered the drill more than 12 kilometers.
The sudden end of a successful project seemed as absurd as the fact that the Americans closed the program of flights to the Moon. Aliens were blamed for the collapse of the lunar project. There are devils and demons in the problems of the Kola Superdeep.
A popular legend says that the drill was repeatedly pulled out from great depths melted. There were no physical reasons for this - the temperature underground did not exceed 200 degrees Celsius, and the drill was designed for a thousand degrees. Then the audio sensors allegedly began to pick up some moans, screams and sighs. Dispatchers monitoring instrument readings complained of feelings of panic and anxiety.
According to legend, it turned out that geologists had drilled to hell. The groans of sinners, extremely high temperatures, the atmosphere of horror at the drilling rig - all this explained why all work on the Kola superdeep was suddenly curtailed.
Many were skeptical about these rumors. However, in 1995, after work had stopped, a powerful explosion occurred at the drilling rig. No one understood what could explode there, not even the leader of the entire project, the prominent geologist David Guberman.
Today, excursions are taken to the abandoned drilling rig and tourists are told a fascinating story about how scientists drilled a hole into the underground kingdom of the dead. It’s as if moaning ghosts roam around the installation, and in the evening demons crawl to the surface and strive to whisk the unwary extreme sportsman into the abyss.
Underground Moon
In fact, the whole “well to hell” story was invented by Finnish journalists by April 1st. Their comic article was republished by American newspapers, and the duck flew to the masses. The long-term drilling of the Kola superdeep reservoir proceeded without any mysticism. But what happened there in reality was more interesting than any legends.
To begin with, ultra-deep drilling was doomed to numerous accidents. Under the yoke of enormous pressure (up to 1000 atmospheres) and high temperatures, the drills could not withstand, the well became clogged, and the pipes used to strengthen the vent broke. Countless times the narrow well was bent so that more and more branches had to be drilled.
The worst accident occurred shortly after the main triumph of geologists. In 1982, they were able to overcome the 12 kilometer mark. These results were solemnly announced in Moscow at the International Geological Congress. Geologists from all over the world were brought to the Kola Peninsula, they were shown a drilling rig and rock samples mined at fantastic depths that humanity had never reached before.
After the celebration, drilling continued. However, the break in work turned out to be fatal. In 1984, the worst drilling accident occurred. As many as five kilometers of pipes came loose and clogged the well. It was impossible to continue drilling. Five years of work were lost overnight.
We had to resume drilling from the 7-kilometer mark. Only in 1990 did geologists again manage to cross 12 kilometers. 12,262 meters - this is the final depth of the Kola well.
But parallel to the terrible accidents, there were also incredible discoveries. Deep drilling is like a time machine. On the Kola Peninsula, the oldest rocks approach the surface, their age exceeding 3 billion years. By going deeper, scientists have gained a clear understanding of what happened on our planet during its youth.
First of all, it turned out that the traditional diagram of the geological section compiled by scientists does not correspond to reality. “Up to 4 kilometers everything went according to theory, and then the end of the world began,” Huberman later said
According to calculations, by drilling through a layer of granite, it was supposed to get to even harder, basaltic rocks. But there was no basalt. After the granite came loose layered rocks, which constantly crumbled and made it difficult to move deeper.
But among rocks 2.8 billion years old, fossilized microorganisms were found. This made it possible to clarify the time of the origin of life on Earth. At even greater depths, huge deposits of methane were found. This clarified the issue of the emergence of hydrocarbons - oil and gas.
And at a depth of over 9 kilometers, scientists discovered a gold-bearing olivine layer, so vividly described by Alexei Tolstoy in “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin.”
But the most fantastic discovery occurred in the late 1970s, when the Soviet lunar station brought back samples of lunar soil. Geologists were amazed to see that its composition completely coincided with the composition of the rocks they mined at a depth of 3 kilometers. How was this possible?
The fact is that one of the hypotheses for the origin of the Moon suggests that several billion years ago the Earth collided with some celestial body. As a result of the collision, a piece broke off from our planet and turned into a satellite. Perhaps this piece came off in the area of the current Kola Peninsula.
The final
So why did they close the Kola superdeep pipeline?
Firstly, the main objectives of the scientific expedition were completed. Unique equipment for drilling at great depths was created, tested under extreme conditions and significantly improved. The collected rock samples were examined and described in detail. The Kola well helped to better understand the structure of the earth's crust and the history of our planet.
Secondly, time itself was not conducive to such ambitious projects. In 1992, funding for the scientific expedition was cut off. The employees quit and went home. But even today the grandiose building of the drilling rig and the mysterious well are impressive in their scale.
Sometimes it seems that the Kola Superdeep has not yet exhausted the entire supply of its wonders. The head of the famous project was also sure of this. “We have the deepest hole in the world - so we must use it!” - exclaimed David Huberman.
It occupies the first position in the list of "Ultradeep Wells of the World". It was drilled to study the structure of deep earth rocks. Unlike other existing wells on the planet, this one was drilled solely from a scientific research point of view and was not used for the purpose of extracting useful resources.
Location of the Kola Superdeep Station
Where is the Kola superdeep well located? ABOUT located in the Murmansk region, near the city of Zapolyarny (about 10 kilometers from it). The location of the well is truly unique. It was founded in the area of the Kola Peninsula. It is where the earth pushes various ancient rocks to the surface every day.
Near the well there is the Pechenga-Imandra-Varzuga rift trough, formed as a result of a fault.
Kola superdeep well: history of appearance
In honor of the centennial anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, drilling of the well began in the first half of 1970.
On May 24, 1970, after the geological expedition approved the location of the well, work began. To a depth of about 7 thousand meters everything went easily and smoothly. After crossing the seven thousandth mark, the work became more difficult and constant collapses began to occur.
As a result of constant breaks of lifting mechanisms and broken drill heads, as well as regular collapses, the walls of the well were subject to the cementing process. However, due to constant problems, the work continued for several years and proceeded extremely slowly.
On June 6, 1979, the well depth reached 9,583 meters, thereby breaking the world record for oil production in the United States of America by Bertha Rogers, located in Oklahoma. At this time, about sixteen scientific laboratories were continuously working in the Kola well, and the drilling process was personally controlled by the Minister of Geology of the Soviet Union, Evgeniy Aleksandrovich Kozlovsky.
In 1983, when the depth of the Kola superdeep well reached 12,066 meters, work was temporarily frozen in connection with preparations for the 1984 International Geological Congress. Upon its completion, work was resumed.
The resumption of work fell on September 27, 1984. But during the first descent, the drill string was broken, and the well collapsed once again. Work resumed from a depth of about 7 thousand meters.
In 1990, the depth of the drill well reached a record 12,262 meters. After another column broke, an order was received to stop drilling the well and complete the work.
Current state of the Kola well
At the beginning of 2008, an ultra-deep well on the Kola Peninsula was considered abandoned, the equipment was dismantled, and a project to demolish existing buildings and laboratories had already been launched.
At the beginning of 2010, the director of the Kola Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that the well was currently undergoing a conservation process and was being destroyed on its own. Since then the question about it has not been raised.
Well depth today
Currently, the Kola superdeep well, photos of which are presented to the reader in the article, is considered one of the largest drilling projects on the planet. Its official depth is 12,263 meters.
Sounds in the Kola well
When the drilling rigs crossed the line of 12 thousand meters, workers began to hear strange sounds coming from the depths. At first they didn't attach any importance to it. However, when all the drilling equipment froze, and deathly silence hung in the well, unusual sounds were heard, which the workers themselves called “the screams of sinners in hell.” Since the sounds of an ultra-deep well were considered quite unusual, it was decided to record them using heat-resistant microphones. When the recordings were listened to, everyone was amazed - they sounded like people screaming and screaming.
A few hours after listening to the recordings, workers found traces of a powerful explosion of previously unknown origin. Work was temporarily stopped until the circumstances were clarified. However, they were resumed within a few days. Having descended into the well again, everyone with bated breath expected to hear human screams, but there was truly deathly silence there.
When the investigation into the origin of the sounds began, questions began to be asked about who heard what. The amazed and frightened workers tried to avoid answering these questions and only brushed them off with the phrase: “I heard something strange...” Only after a large amount of time and after the project was closed, a version was put forward that sounds of unknown origin were the sound of the movement of tectonic plates. This version was eventually refuted.
The secrets that shroud the wells
In 1989, the Kola superdeep well, the sounds from which excite the human imagination, was called “the road to hell.” The legend originated on the air of an American television company, which took an April Fool's article in a Finnish newspaper about the Kola well as reality. The article said that every drilled kilometer on the way to the 13th brought complete misfortune to the country. As the legend goes, at a depth of 12 thousand meters, workers began to imagine human cries for help, which were recorded on ultra-sensitive microphones.
With each new kilometer on the way to the 13th, disasters occurred in the country, for example, on the above path the USSR collapsed.
It was also noted that, having drilled a well to 14.5 thousand meters, the workers came across empty “rooms”, the temperature in which reached 1100 degrees Celsius. By lowering one of the heat-resistant microphones into one of these holes, they recorded moans, grinding sounds and screams. These sounds were called the “voice of the underworld,” and the well itself began to be called nothing less than “the road to hell.”
However, soon the research group itself refuted this legend. Scientists reported that the depth of the well at that time was only 12,263 meters, and the maximum recorded temperature was 220 degrees Celsius. Only one fact remains unrefuted, thanks to which the Kola superdeep well has such a dubious reputation - sounds.
Interview with one of the workers of the Kola superdeep well
In one of the interviews dedicated to refuting the legend of the Kola well, David Mironovich Guberman said: “When they ask me about the veracity of this legend and about the existence of the demon that we found there, I answer that this is complete nonsense. But to be honest, I cannot deny the fact that we are faced with something supernatural. At first, sounds of unknown origin began to disturb us, then there was an explosion. When we looked into the well, at the same depth, a few days later, everything was absolutely normal...”
What benefits did drilling the Kola superdeep well bring?
Of course, one of the main advantages of the appearance of this well is significant progress in the field of drilling. New methods and types of drilling were developed. Drilling and scientific equipment was also personally created for the Kola superdeep well, which is still used today.
Another plus was the discovery of a new location of valuable natural resources, including gold.
The main scientific goal of the project to study the deep layers of the earth has been achieved. Many existing theories (including those about the basalt layer of the earth) were refuted.
Number of ultra-deep wells in the world
In total, there are about 25 ultra-deep wells on the planet.
Most of them are located on the territory of the former USSR, but about 8 are located all over the world.
Ultra-deep wells located in the territory of the former USSR
There were a huge number of ultra-deep wells on the territory of the Soviet Union, but the following should be especially highlighted:
- Muruntau well. The depth of the well reaches only 3 thousand meters. Located in the Republic of Uzbekistan, in the small village of Muruntau. Drilling of the well began in 1984 and has not yet been completed.
- Krivoy Rog well. The depth reaches only 5383 meters out of 12 thousand planned. Drilling began in 1984 and ended in 1993. The location of the well is considered to be Ukraine, the vicinity of the city of Krivoy Rog.
- Dnieper-Donetsk well. She is a fellow countrywoman of the previous one and is also located in Ukraine, near the Donetsk Republic. The depth of the well today is 5691 meters. Drilling began in 1983 and continues to this day.
- Ural well. It has a depth of 6100 meters. Located in the Sverdlovsk region, near the city of Verkhnyaya Tura. The work lasted for 20 years, from 1985 to 2005.
- Biikzhal well. Its depth reaches 6700 meters. The well was drilled from 1962 to 1971. It is located on the Caspian lowland.
- Aralsol well. Its depth is one hundred meters greater than Biikzhalskaya and is only 6800 meters. The year of drilling and the location of the well are completely identical to the Bizhalskaya well.
- Timan-Pechora well. Its depth reaches 6904 meters. Located in the Komi Republic. To be more precise, in the Vuktyl region. The work lasted about 10 years, from 1984 to 1993.
- Tyumen well. The depth reaches 7502 meters out of 8000 planned. The well is located near the city and village of Korotchaevo. Drilling took place from 1987 to 1996.
- Shevchenkovskaya well. It was drilled during one year in 1982 with the aim of extracting oil in Western Ukraine. The depth of the well is 7520 meters. Located in the Carpathian region.
- Yen-Yakhinskaya well. It has a depth of about 8250 meters. The only well that exceeded the drilling plan (originally planned 6000). It is located in Western Siberia, near the city of Novy Urengoy. Drilling lasted from 2000 to 2006. Currently, it was the last operating ultra-deep well in Russia.
- Saatlinskaya well. Its depth is 8324 meters. Drilling was carried out from 1977 to 1982. It is located in Azerbaijan, 10 kilometers from the city of Saatly, within the Kursk Bulge.
The world's ultra-deep wells
In other countries there are also a number of ultra-deep wells that cannot be ignored:
- Sweden. Silyan Ring is 6800 meters deep.
- Kazakhstan. Tasym South-East with a depth of 7050 meters.
- USA. Bighorn is 7583 meters deep.
- Austria. Zisterdorf depth 8553 meters.
- USA. University is 8686 meters deep.
- Germany. KTB-Oberpfalz with a depth of 9101 meters.
- USA. Beydat-Unit is 9159 meters deep.
- USA. Bertha Rogers is 9583 meters deep.
World records for ultra-deep wells in the world
In 2008, the world record of the Kola well was broken by the Maersk oil well. Its depth is 12,290 meters.
After this, several more world records for ultra-deep wells were recorded:
- At the beginning of January 2011, the record was broken by the oil production well of the Sakhalin-1 project, the depth of which reaches 12,345 meters.
- In June 2013, the record was broken by a well at the Chayvinskoye field, the depth of which was 12,700 meters.
However, the mysteries and secrets of the Kola superdeep well have not been revealed or explained to this day. Regarding the sounds present during its drilling, new theories arise to this day. Who knows, maybe this is really the fruit of a wild human imagination? Well, where do so many eyewitnesses come from then? Maybe soon there will be a person who will give a scientific explanation of what is happening, and perhaps the well will remain a legend that will be retold for many more centuries...
In the 50-70s of the last century, the world changed at incredible speed. Things have appeared that are difficult to imagine today’s world without: the Internet, computers, cellular communications, the conquest of space and the depths of the sea. Man was rapidly expanding the spheres of his presence in the Universe, but he still had rather rough ideas about the structure of his “home” - planet Earth. Although even then the idea of ultra-deep drilling was not new: back in 1958, the Americans launched the Mohole project. Its name is formed from two words:
Moho- a surface named after Andrija Mohorovicic, a Croatian geophysicist and seismologist who in 1909 identified the lower boundary of the earth’s crust, on which there is an abrupt increase in the speed of seismic waves;
Hole- well, hole, opening. Based on assumptions that the thickness of the earth's crust under the oceans is much less than on land, 5 wells were drilled near the island of Guadelupe with a depth of about 180 meters (with an ocean depth of up to 3.5 km). Over five years, researchers drilled five wells, collected many samples from the basalt layer, but did not reach the mantle. As a result, the project was declared a failure and the work was stopped.
Kola superdeep well Since the end of the 19th 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. Just 30 years ago, researchers were sure that the granite layer begins at a depth of 50 meters and continues up to three kilometers, and then there are basalts. The mantle was assumed to be at a depth of 15-18 kilometers.
An ultra-deep well, which began to be drilled in the USSR on the Kola Peninsula, showed that scientists were wrong...
Three billion year dive
Projects for traveling deep into the Earth appeared in the early 1960s in several countries. The Americans were the first to start drilling ultra-deep wells, and they tried to do it in places where, according to seismic studies, the earth's crust should have been thinner. These places, according to calculations, were located at the bottom of the oceans, and the most promising area was considered to be the area near the island of Maui from the Hawaiian group, where ancient rocks lie under the very ocean floor and the earth's mantle is located approximately at a depth of five kilometers under four kilometers of water. Alas, both attempts to break through the earth’s crust in this place ended in failure at a depth of three kilometers.
The first domestic projects also involved underwater drilling - in the Caspian Sea or on Lake Baikal. But in 1963, drilling scientist Nikolai Timofeev convinced the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology that it was 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 from a scientific point of view. The drilling site was chosen on the Kola Peninsula, which is located on the so-called Baltic Shield, consisting of the most ancient earth rocks known to mankind. The multi-kilometer section of the shield layers was supposed to show a picture of the history of the planet over the past three billion years.
Deeper and deeper and deeper...
The start of work after almost five years of preparation was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin in 1970. The project began in earnest. The well housed 16 research laboratories, each the size of an average factory; the project was personally supervised by the Minister of Geology of the USSR. Ordinary employees received triple salaries. Everyone was guaranteed an apartment in Moscow or Leningrad. It is not surprising that getting into the Kola Superdeep Station was much more difficult than joining the cosmonaut corps.
The appearance of the well could disappoint an outside observer. No elevators or spiral staircases leading into the depths of the Earth. Only a drill with a diameter of a little more than 20 centimeters went underground. In general, the Kola superdeep can be imagined as a thin needle piercing the earth's thickness. A drill with numerous sensors located at the end of this needle, after several hours of work, was raised for almost a whole day for inspection, readings and repairs, and then lowered for a day. It couldn’t be faster: the strongest composite cable (drill string) could break under its own weight.
What was happening at depth at the time of drilling was not known for certain. Ambient temperature, noise and other parameters were transmitted upward with a minute delay. Nevertheless, the drillers said that even such contact with the underground was sometimes seriously frightening. The sounds coming from below were similar to 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 could take this form 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.
In 1983, when the depth of the well reached 12,066 meters, work was temporarily stopped: it was decided to prepare materials on ultra-deep drilling for the International Geological Congress, which was planned to be held in 1984 in Moscow. It was there that foreign scientists first learned about the very existence of the Kola Superdeep, all information about which had been classified until then. Work resumed on September 27, 1984. However, during the first descent of the drill, an accident occurred - the drill string broke off again. Drilling had to continue from a depth of 7,000 meters, creating a new trunk, and by 1990 this new branch reached 12,262 meters, which was an absolute record for ultra-deep wells, broken only in 2008. Drilling was stopped in 1992, this time, as it turned out, forever. There were no funds for further work.
Discoveries and finds
The discoveries made at the Kola superdeep mine have made a real revolution in our knowledge about the structure of the earth's crust. Theorists promised that the temperature of the Baltic Shield would remain relatively low to a depth of at least 15 kilometers. This means that a well can be drilled up to almost 20 kilometers, right up to the mantle. But already at the fifth kilometer the temperature exceeded 700°C, at the seventh - over 1200°C, and at a depth of twelve it was hotter than 2200°C.
Kola drillers questioned the theory of the layered structure of the earth's crust - at least in the interval up to 12,262 meters. It was believed that there was a surface layer (young rocks), then there should be granites, basalts, the mantle and the core. But the granites turned out to be three kilometers lower than expected. The basalts that were supposed to lie underneath were not found at all. An incredible surprise for scientists was the abundance of cracks and voids at a depth of over 10 kilometers. In these voids, the drill swung like a pendulum, which led to serious difficulties in work due to its deviation from the vertical axis. In the voids, the presence of water vapor was recorded, which moved there at high speed, as if carried by some unknown pumps. These vapors created the very sounds that thrilled the drillers.
Quite unexpectedly for everyone, the hypothesis of the writer Alexei Tolstoy about the olivine belt, expressed in the novel “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin,” was confirmed. At a depth of over 9.5 kilometers, they discovered a real treasure trove of all kinds of minerals, in particular gold, which turned out to be 78 grams per ton. By the way, industrial production is carried out at a concentration of 34 grams per ton.
Another surprise: life on Earth, it turns out, arose one and a half billion years earlier than expected. At depths where it was believed that no organic matter could exist, 14 species of fossilized microorganisms were discovered (the age of these layers exceeded 2.8 billion years). At even greater depths, where there are no longer sedimentary rocks, methane appeared in high concentrations, which finally refuted the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons such as oil and gas.
It is impossible not to mention the discovery made by comparing lunar soil delivered by the Soviet space station in the late 70s from the surface of the Moon and samples taken at the Kola well from a depth of 3 kilometers. It turned out that these samples are as similar as two drops of water. Some astronomers saw this as evidence that the Moon had once broken away from the Earth as a result of a cataclysm (possibly a collision of the planet with a large asteroid). However, according to others, this similarity only indicates that the Moon was formed from the same gas and dust cloud as the Earth, and at the initial geological stages they “developed” in the same way.
The Kola Superdeep was ahead of its time
The Kola well showed that it is possible to go 14 or even 15 kilometers deep into the Earth. However, one such well is unlikely to provide fundamentally new knowledge about the earth’s crust. This requires a whole network of wells drilled at different points on the earth's surface. But the times when ultra-deep wells were drilled for purely scientific purposes seem to be gone. This pleasure is too expensive. Modern ultra-deep drilling programs are no longer as ambitious as before, and pursue practical goals.
Mainly it is the discovery and extraction of minerals. In the United States, oil and gas production from depths of 6-7 kilometers is already becoming commonplace. In the future, Russia will also begin to pump hydrocarbons from such levels. However, even those deep wells that are being drilled now bring a lot of valuable information, which geologists strive to generalize in order to obtain a holistic picture of at least the surface layers of the earth’s crust. But what lies below will remain a mystery for a long time to come. Only scientists working in ultra-deep wells like the Kola can reveal it using the most modern scientific equipment. In the future, such wells will become for humanity a kind of telescopes into the mysterious underground world of the planet, about which we know no more than about distant galaxies.