C4Charles retweetledi

After staring at the Artemis II photos for so long, I went asking the sort of questions babies ask.
I found out yesterday humans haven’t dug lower than 2% into the earth. Thar’s the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia which is about 12.2 kilometres into the Earth’s crust. It was drilled by Soviet scientists between 1970 and 1994 on the Kola Peninsula, it remains the deepest artificial point on Earth by vertical depth.
The distance to the centre of the Earth is roughly 6,371 kilometres. They reached 12km and couldn’t continue.
Even at that depth, the temperature reached approximately 180°C which was far hotter than models had predicted. This is what halted drilling. The rock became so plastic under that heat and pressure that it behaved more like a fluid than a solid, making further progress impossible.
The borehole was welded shut in 2005 as the site was abandoned. No country has since attempted to surpass it.
Add this to the fact that we know more about Space than we do what’s beneath the Oceans!
English


























