The depths of the earth hold secrets, as do the bottoms of the sea and space. Although several initiatives have dug miles into the earth’s crust, mankind has never progressed beyond this first layer of the planet. Nevertheless, science indirectly achieves a good understanding of the dynamics inside the earth by inferring measurements such as temperature, pressure and certain chemical components of the innermost layers of the earth.
The thickness of the earth’s crust varies and is generally between 5 and 100 kilometers. It may seem easy to traverse where it is thinnest, but these sites are only found on the ocean floor the continents are reserved for the greatest extents of this layer.
The largest drilling in the earth’s crust to date was carried out in Russia during the Soviet Union period. It corresponds to the Kola Superdeep Hole, the name of the peninsula in the northwest of the country where the spring is located. Excavations began in 1970, when the Cold War was pitting the United States against technological advances made by the Soviet Union. Just as there was the race to space, it can be said that there was also a race to the center of the earth.
After 20 years, the Soviets reached a depth of about 12.2 kilometers a record that has not yet been beaten. The Kola Fountain still exists but is now sealed. During the same period, the US tried to dig a well on the seabed precisely because of the lesser thickness of the crust, but the high cost of the project meant that the mission was canceled from the start. Germany also started a similar initiative, which was stopped at 9.1 km in 1995.
Also on German soil, the American artist, sculptor and illustrator Walter De Maria created a conceptual work entitled “The Vertical Kilometer”. With the help of an oil company, the artist drilled a kilometer into the earth’s crust in the city of Kassel and filled it with a brass rod five centimeters in diameter and weighing 18 tons.
The object has a “sister” work called “The Broken Kilometer”. This installation, in turn, consists of 500 twometrelong brass rods arranged in five rows of one hundred. Interpretations of these works claim that they represent a reflection of our place in the universe, or that they “give back” to Earth the material that humanity is withdrawing from it.
This month, China launched a project that aims to drill nearly 11km into the Earth’s crust, reaching rocks as old as 145 million years. Still, the Soviet balance sheet would remain intact. In any case, the 12 km drilled into Russian soil is only 0.18% of the distance from the surface to the center of the planet, which is 6,371 km.
Source: Discover Magazine; BBC