Several years ago, in the summer of 2006, a number of news agencies and news feeds spread around the world that American researchers were going to organize an expedition to the North Pole in order to … penetrate deep into the Earth, proving that it is hollow.
As the newspapers of those years wrote, the travelers allegedly even chartered the Yamal nuclear icebreaker, and the researchers themselves were going to go down to the inner continent of the Earth and visit the palace of the king of the inner world. Seven years have passed since then, and that expedition, alas, did not take place. What changed, the plans of the travelers remained a mystery.
But any curious person who decides to find out what is in the center of the Earth will be very surprised to learn that academic science has only versions of the structure of the Earth that are taught in school, but he probably does not know anything. And some pundits even lean towards the version of the hollow Earth and the real existence of an underground inhabited world.
The well-known traveler, geologist, head of the expedition "Russian biogen" Alexander Borisovich Gurvits agreed to tell how everything is in fact, to the "National Geographic Society".
D. S.: Alexander Borisovich, so what is under our feet?
A. G.: No matter how amazing it sounds, none of the living people will be able to answer this question for certain. To reveal the true picture of the structure of our planet is a very important task, but no less difficult. It is important because it will allow scientists to reveal the laws of natural phenomena occurring in the depths of the Earth.
In turn, knowledge of these laws will make it possible to predict natural disasters in advance, because tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are just an echo of the deep phenomena of the Earth. Moreover, over the past 25 years, these phenomena in one form or another have affected a good half of the world's inhabitants. The number of deaths from natural and technical disasters annually increases by 4.5%, injured by 8.5%, and economic losses are growing by 11%.
The difficulty in predicting disasters lies in the fact that all attempts to penetrate deep into the Earth with the help of mines stopped at a depth of 3 km. The further path was blocked by rock bursts: emissions of ore gas and ball lightning. As for deep drilling, the record was only 12.2 km, while there were still 6,300 km to the supposed center of the Earth. Therefore, the true picture of the structure of the Earth, and even more so of its core, is still hidden from the eyes of fundamental science.
Promotional video:
D. S.: So what prevents you from drilling a well right to the center of the Earth and finding out what is there?
A. G.: Surprisingly, we know much more about the structure of space than about what is under our feet. Although attempts to penetrate the Earth's mantle have been made more than once. The first two ultra-deep wells were drilled in Louisiana, North America. Pragmatically fearing possible contingencies, the project managers equipped the well with 1-kilometer-diameter casing pipes. With three powerful automatic safety locks.
A special concrete plant was located next to the drilling rig, which, in the event of an accident, would feed a quick-hardening solution into the casing. To a depth of 9 km. the well was drilled as usual. But then the signs of internal pressure began to appear deeper, and the drilling mud was "polluted" with hydrogen sulfide.
The drillers immediately began to joke that they had drilled to the underworld. And then, as if in confirmation of their words, molten sulfur poured out of the well from a depth of 9.6 km, and the tunnellers began to lose consciousness. Fortunately, the automatic protection worked. The safety gates closed. And the concrete plant provided the supply of the special solution to the casing - the wells were drowned out.
DS: But this is the west, and our scientists tried to "get to the underworld"?
A. G.: Since all these experiments were carried out in the last century, then, of course, the USSR could not help answering the challenge and also tried to drill several superdeep wells, but the domestic drillers suffered the same sad fate.
While drilling the well "Kumzha-9" on the Pechora River in the Arkhangelsk Region, despite the favorable forecast of geophysicists, from a depth of 7 km. a powerful gusher of gas, oil and drilling mud unexpectedly struck from the wellhead. So much so that the drill simply "flew" into the zone of abnormally high reservoir pressure.
The pipes from the rig flew like pasta from a saucepan. A torch with a height of 150 meters immediately hit. It was not possible to get closer than half a kilometer even in a fireman's overalls.
They tried to extinguish the torch with tanks - unsuccessfully. It hummed like a jet engine. As a result, it was possible to extinguish it only with the help of underground nuclear explosions. For this, a deviated well was drilled towards the emergency wellbore. A nuclear mine was brought along it and detonated at a depth of 1.5 km. An underground chamber formed and the lateral pressure zone blocked the Kumzha shaft. When the torch from the emergency mine fell asleep, a 76-meter rock rose on the site of the drilling rig.
It is on the steel skeleton of the rig that a clay drilling mud has frozen and turned into ceramic, as after a year of firing. It is a pity that it was then demolished.
D. S.: It's strange that in this case there was no sulfur. Really no one succeeded in diving deeper into the Earth than 7-8 kilometers?
A. G.: Well, why not? The most instructive example for geologists, geophysicists and even biologists was the example of a superdeep well on the so-called SGS-3 located on the Kola Peninsula near the village of Nikel. At this mine, a world record for drilling to a depth of 12.3 km was set, which has not yet been surpassed. The work on the selection of the site for the SGS-3 was carried out by a special institute of geophysics with a total of 5,000 employees, and 520 people worked at the mine itself in the Soviet years, today there are only about 50 of them.
After "clearing" a plot of 3 square meters. km. to the estimated drilling depth - 30 km., the first drill was lowered. According to preliminary data, the sinkers had to lift samples or cores to the surface, consisting of the mineral basalt, and the deeper, the denser the sample should be - the core. Taking into account the meteorological conditions of the Arctic, a closed cover was erected over the drilling rig, in the form of a bell tower 102 m high.
All working areas of the drilling rig were automated and mechanized in the best possible way, with telephone and radio communications established between all departments. The Bell Tower was controlled by microphones. Up to 7 km. drilling proceeded as usual. The only "but" was the rise in temperature from deep penetration. The surprises began at a depth of 7.5 km.
The temperature at the bottom, where the drill directly touched the basalt, rose to 100 degrees, and the density of the samples raised to the surface decreased by 20%. It definitely spoke of approaching the voids. In the process of analyzing the sample, geochemists found various gases (hydrogen, helium) in it, and biologists - unknown bacteria.
Since the bacteria were dead, they were named aerophobic i.e. afraid of the air. We tried to get new samples of bacteria, but suddenly the drill jammed tightly. Immediately, they started sinking the second shaft. And at a depth of 8 km. the temperature has already risen to 120 degrees. The cores became porous, the number of bacteria increased, and again the accident. However, no one wanted to stop drilling, because it was about the prestige of the state.
Ordinary steel pipes were replaced with new ones made of high-strength steel, a drill was made of molybdenum, diamond grains were replaced with an artificial material called elbor, which surpassed diamond in refractoriness, strength and hardness. Finally, the seventh borehole reached a depth of 12,240 meters. And then the inexplicable happened.
At night, when only the duty engineer, mechanic and electrician were near the drill. The drill jammed again, the machine fell silent and suddenly the created silence was broken by a strange noise from the well. Something very quickly rose along the trunk from the depths of the Earth to the surface. Suddenly there was a light cotton and something flew out of the casing …
Each of the three witnesses to this event saw something different: a shadow, a cat and a bat. At the same time, an incomprehensible creature swore loudly, climbed in a spiral to the top of the drilling "bell tower", and then, gliding back down, darted into the well.
D. S.: Looks like a science fiction anecdote. Maybe people just dreamed of something because of overwork?
A. G.: Of course, everything could be attributed to human hallucinations, but the microphones recorded the incident from start to finish. The event was so extraordinary that it was reported on Mayak radio, and a short article appeared in the Trud newspaper describing the incident. And note, all this happened in the eighties in the materialist USSR. By the way, today the sounds of the underworld from the well can be heard on a special, albeit English-language site on the Internet. What happened next?
Unfortunately … nothing. All the information went to unknown archives, the drifting team was disbanded, and all registration records were sent to the state security. Until 1992, they still tried to continue drilling at SGS-3, but they failed to go beyond 12262.
D. S.: So what is the main problem of all researchers of the Earth's depths? Why over and over again they stumble upon insurmountable difficulties in understanding the bowels of the Earth?
A. G.: Drivers in all cases of ultra-deep drilling acted competently and professionally. The error lay in the original controversial hypothesis about the structure of the Earth. The real, scientific instrumental study of the structure of the Earth began only at the beginning of the 20th century with the emergence and development of the science of seismology and the invention of the seismograph. Which, could record on a paper tape vibrations of the earth's surface or waves that propagate in an elastic medium, i.e. in rocks, stones, sand.
But the American scientist G. F. Reed, who was one of the first to use a seismograph to record vibrations of the earth's surface from artificially created earthquakes, saw that with an increase in the depth of the earth's rocks, the speed of propagation of elastic vibrations-waves increases. At the same time, another American scientist H. Richard conducted tests on the speed of propagation of these waves on rock samples, on limestone, on granite, on basalt.
He found that the more one cubic centimeter of the sample weighs, the greater the propagation speed. That is, in basalt, the speed of an elastic wave is 2 times higher than in limestone. By combining the results of observations and experiments, both scientists came to the conclusion that light rocks lie on the surface of the Earth, and heavy rocks in the depths.
D. S.: It looks logical.
A. G.: Yes, geologists, mineralogists and petrographers liked this scientific interpretation of the structure of the upper layers of the globe. And the fact that rock samples were delivered to Reid's laboratory from mines only 300 meters deep did not raise any questions, since none of them looked deeper.
D. S.: Really, at the beginning of the 20th century, during the period of rapid development of technical progress, there were no scientists able to challenge the claims of the Americans?
A. G.: There certainly were such scientists. One of them is the world famous academician Vladimir Obruchev. He developed the theory of a hollow earth. But by this time, the Reid-Reed concept was so generally accepted by the orthodox science from geology that Obruchev was able to convey his discovery to people only thanks to his novel "Plutonium", which was very popular in the Soviet years in the USSR. The theory reflected in the novel was a version that the Earth is not a homogeneous body, but a hollow ball inside which a dwarf floats in zero gravity - a small sun, the density of which is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the weight of basalt.
D. S.: But - this is fantastic! Everyone knows that the core of the Earth consists of iron and nickel, which create a magnetic field around the Earth.
A. G.: Indeed, today they teach this in high school, but already at universities, professors say that nuclear reactions still occur in the nucleus, which in theory should destroy the magnetic field. In this model, the Earth is represented as a cooling and calming ball, and the periodic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are the last convulsions of the planet.
D. S.: So Obruchev was wrong?
A. G.: Quite the opposite. He was close to solving the mystery of the Earth's core like no other. Obruchev's hypothesis is categorically confirmed by a new science - ether dynamics. Before him, at the end of the 17th century, Edmund Halley spoke about this, after whom the comet is named, which frightens the population of the Earth every 76 years. He argued that our planet consists of three nested spheres, which may well be inhabited. The famous Leonard Euler adhered to the same version, who, solving the equations of celestial mechanics, calculated that the Earth is hollow.
D. S.: So which version seems to you the most interesting?
A. G.: Before obtaining empirically verified results, it is definitely impossible to talk about something. But on the other hand, it is already clear today that modern fundamental theories raise more questions than answers. But, the most attractive, probably, looks like the theory of the German physicist and geologist Peter Paul, who for many years tried to create a unified theory of the origin and development of the Earth.
He rejects both theories based on comparing the speed of passage of seismic waves deep into the earth, and the assumptions about thermonuclear fusion taking place in the center of the Earth, since lava does not have increased radioactivity. The scientist believes that initially there was a certain energy-informational sphere, around which a certain frame was first formed. On which, subsequently, the synthesis of matter took place, magma appeared and the planet acquired a body. And then everything went according to the principle of the growth of rings on a cut of a tree or a multilayer cake.
First, the atmosphere and the earth's crust are formed, separated by emptiness. This is followed by the inner mantle, followed by the outer, then again the earth's crust, where you and I live, and again the atmosphere. The most interesting thing is that the inner layers may well be located: mountains, rivers, forests, mineral deposits. And the layers themselves can also be several.
Therefore, the legends about the gnomes who have gone underground for entire civilizations may well be, in the scientist's opinion, reality. By the way, his version is very competently stringing on itself many theories of the structure of the Earth, both Western and domestic. Paul even suggested ideal places for drilling the entrances to the inner layers of the Earth, they, in his opinion, are located in the region … of the North Pole, where a layer of magma at the edges of the pole is very small, but on it, according to the scientist, there is no magma at all!
D. S.: I would like our scientists to have the last word, what do the domestic luminaries of science lean towards?
A. G.: In Russia, as I said, a whole scientific school was developed, united by the model of the structure of the Earth - ether dynamics. According to this theory, which combines the scientific facts of all previously developed scientific models of the structure of the Earth, our planet is in constant energy-information exchange with the universe.
It has been scientifically proven that light from stars flies to Earth from all corners of space, which is converted into electrical energy by solar panels. Together with it, a flow of protons or proton gas, which scientists call the etheric wind, goes to the Earth. Further along the faults in the earth's crust, along the crack in the lithosphere, it penetrates into the womb of the Earth and it … grows! According to some sources, its weight increases by 500 tons every second.
Of course, due to this, the distance between the continents also grows, so it is proved that every year America floats away from Europe by 2 cm. Therefore, fans of ether dynamics are convinced that the Earth inside is filled with dense ether and is empty. But closer to the surface, plasma-fragments of atoms are formed from dense ether, which then form the plasmasphere, which, in turn, the minerals floating in magma or mantle, and then everything, according to the classical theory taught in the school of theory, is the plates of the lithosphere on which we live.
Interviewed by Dmitry Sokolov