The Kola Peninsula is a treasury of minerals. The most ancient rocks of the Earth come out here practically to the surface, forming the Baltic shield with a scattering of hundreds of minerals. Iron, nickel, titanium, uranium, gemstones and rare earth metals - what not.
The Kola Peninsula is a treasury of minerals. The most ancient rocks of the Earth come out here practically to the surface, forming the Baltic shield with a scattering of hundreds of minerals. Iron, nickel, titanium, uranium, gemstones and rare earth metals - what not.
We planned a well of unprecedented depth - 15 kilometers. The Mariana Trench is even smaller.
The Kola Peninsula is a treasury of minerals. The most ancient rocks of the Earth come out here practically to the surface, forming the Baltic shield with a scattering of hundreds of minerals. Iron, nickel, titanium, uranium, gemstones and rare earth metals - what not.
We planned a well of unprecedented depth - 15 kilometers. The Mariana Trench is even smaller.
What for? The researchers wanted to know if there really was a boundary between the granite and basalt layers of the earth's crust. And also to get data on its lower edge and the composition of rocks in the bowels of the planet. The engineers were also given a testing ground for the implementation of new ideas.
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For example, to prevent the drill string from bursting under its own weight of 200 tons, it was made of a light alloy of aluminum, not steel. You had to figure out everything on your own, without Western experience, which was a rarity for the USSR.
It should be noted that the main task was set for the Kola Superdeep: not a single foreign device. Everything should be your own. Its own means of destruction of rocks, its own drilling rig, its pipes, its own equipment for controlling the process and, in the end, everything related to the organization of work.
"This is how the building where the drillers worked now looks."
Under the leadership of David Guberman, scientists changed the idea of the world. It turned out that the “layer cake”, which is still drawn in textbooks as a cut of the earth's crust, has nothing to do with reality. They did not reach the border between granites and basalts, but they found unevenness of a different kind.
At the same time, the heat map of the subsoil was corrected: it was believed that the temperature increased by 10 degrees per kilometer of drilling, but at the 12 km mark, 220 degrees were recorded. Exploration was not without: copper-nickel ores, gold and silver were found in the rock mass.
Previously, geologists believed that ore deposits spread no deeper than 3-5 kilometers. We found signs of them all along the well. Analyzing the information received, they came to the conclusion that the entire earth's crust, which is more than 40 kilometers thick, is saturated with minerals. This means that mankind is not threatened by raw materials hunger.
Without SG-3, as the Kola Superdeep was called, this optimism would have been impossible. Although the well itself was not suitable for mining, it was created for other purposes. Nobody planned to get the gold from there - it's just a myth picked up by the press.
The problem is not even in the technique of extracting precious metals from depth, but in their quantity. Especially for w3bsit3-dns.com, the situation was clarified by the doctor of geological and mineralogical sciences Alexander Aleksandrovich Kremenetsky - one of the researchers of this object. The raw material potential of Kola, according to the expert, is exaggerated - unlike its importance for science.
Alexander Kremenetsky reports:
SG-3 over a distance of more than 12 km actually exposed only three small ore occurrences: in the depth interval 1500-1800 m - a zone of sulfide copper-nickel mineralization with a single ore body of insignificant (10-15 m) thickness, at depths of 7635 and 8711 m - thin interlayers of ferruginous quartzites and iron-titanium mineralization, respectively.
Finally, at depths of 9500-10600 m, several intervals of gold-silver mineralization were revealed (Au - up to 6.7 grams per ton, Ag - up to 250 g / t) with a thickness of 40 to 250 m. None of these zones has absolutely any of practical importance for mining and is of exclusively scientific interest.
And what kind of gold to talk about when knowledge is more expensive? But the well turned out to be both a suitable tool for predicting earthquakes, and proof of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon, which today finds more and more confirmation. But at what cost is this achieved?
It is no coincidence that the project is compared with the space project: even if the rockets were not built, a lot of finance was spent on Kola.
We had to build a drilling building, our own plant for assembling equipment, 16 huge laboratories for studying samples - they were fully deployed. The selection of employees also resembled a competition for an astronaut, only instead of flying, they were waiting for two decades of hard work.
For comparison, the American well Bertha Rogers, 9.5 km deep, was drilled in just 512 days. But no core was taken out of it - samples of rocks that help to study the earth's interior. But now these cylinders can be used to make a "sausage" over 5 kilometers long, where billions of years of biography of our planet are recorded.
Well to hell
It is clear that with such a scale, there were not only successes, but also problems. If everything went more or less smoothly up to the 7 km mark, then the ancient rocks showed character. Biting into layered structures, the drill often deviated from the vertical course, tightly stuck in depth.
The most serious accident occurred on September 27, 1984 - after a downtime caused by the World Geological Congress in Moscow and foreign visits to the Kola well. Back to work, the drillers lowered the string into the hole section by section. We routinely followed the instrument readings and even reached a new milestone of 12,066 meters.
Such records have become commonplace - no one has penetrated deeper into the planet's crust anyway.
Suddenly the drill string got stuck. People began to drag it to the surface, but it turned out that the drill simply broke away from the main structure.
Engineers wasted six months trying to get the lost out of the ground. As the geologist Aleksey Osadchiy wrote about this incident, "it was not a pity for the pipes, but for the results of five years of labor." Since then, accidents have become more frequent, turning into a complete curse for SG-3 employees. It seemed that an evil spirit would not let a person go further, inside the Earth.
Rumors spread about the intervention of otherworldly forces. Leisure conspiracy theorists could not pass by the deepest well in the world, and even in the USSR. Although who exactly threw in a duck about the devilry happening in the depths?
In an interview with the Rossiya TV channel, David Guberman referred to a certain Finnish newspaper for youth, where on April 1, 1989, they decided to joke like that. But the myth found its classic embodiment in the book of the famous anthropologist and collector of urban legends Jan Brunwand.
Like, somewhere in distant Siberia, geologists drilled a well about 14.4 km deep, when suddenly the drill bit began to rotate at a breakneck speed. The project manager decided that a cavity had been found inside the Earth. Then scientists measured the temperature in this abyss - a thousand degrees Celsius.
They lowered the ultra-sensitive microphones to the bottom of the well and, to their surprise, allegedly heard the screams of thousands, if not millions, of suffering souls.
After the publication, the terrible story went to the people. What was the basis for such exotic speculation? If you remember, the World Geological Congress ended in 1984, and foreign specialists visited the Kola well, after which an article was published on the pages of Scientific American about the achievements of Soviet drillers.
This information so excited the believers of the citizens of the United States that they later got into the broadcasting network of local Christian television. Naturally, the real facts from the scientific journal were distorted beyond recognition.
Scientists did not expect a temperature rise of 20 degrees per kilometer? Then let it be hot there! Are discoveries made about the structure of the bowels of our planet? Indeed, demons are climbing through this well! The work of Soviet geologists was also presented in an infernal light: they say, look at these atheist communists - they have already got to the devil.
Has someone really lowered the microphone to this depth? Nonsense: for the acoustic study of rocks, a probe with a generator and a vibration receiver was used.
The signal was reflected from the earth and transmitted in the form of an electrical impulse to an ordinary TV - the researchers literally looked at the underground sounds, and did not listen to them with headphones. But the public is greedy for sensations. The Norwegian teacher Age Rendalen added fuel to the fire by writing a heartfelt letter about demons and faith:
I must admit that the reports of the well only made me laugh. I didn’t believe a single word and even told a friend about Americans who believe that hell physically exists inside the Earth. But the news became more and more, and I was seized with fear - if hell were real, I would definitely get there. For several days I dreamed of fire and screams, until I gave up and dedicated my soul to God.
Straight Blessed Augustine. Rendalen did not stop at the "confession" - after that he stated that Soviet atheists were deliberately hiding the truth. Otherwise, the whole world will know about the place where people posthumously suffer for sins.
For persuasiveness, the Norwegian launched a story about a creature like a bat, supposedly burst out through a hellish well.
Trying to get to the bottom of the truth, the journalists went to the very Finnish newspapers that David Guberman spoke about - they turned out to be not so much youth as religious. At the same time, they contacted Randalen, who confirmed that all his "revelations" were a joke. It seems that everything fell into place? No matter how it is.
Yes, the story of the infernal well turned out to be fake with roots in the Christian communities of the United States. And the famous recording of screams - a reworking of the scale from the horror film "The Bloody Baron" by Mario Bava. But the myth is still alive. Why? When people talk about the elasticity anisotropy of the Proterozoic and Archean deposits of the Baltic Shield, it is boring. But it is worth braiding spirits and devilry, as the eyes of the average man light up.
The Kola Superdeep, of course, "makes noise", but in a scientific, not a mystical sense. And the work of a driller is hard - to someone it really would seem hellish.
It took a long time to build - they broke in a moment
With the collapse of the USSR, the Kola well suffered the fate of all the grandiose construction projects of that country. Back in 1990, the correspondent of "Krasnaya Zvezda" wrote about plans for 14.5 kilometers, but after a couple of years the drilling was stopped at around 12,262 meters - humanity never reached great depths. It is no coincidence that the object was included in the Guinness Book. But the authorities showed no interest in him - they had to cut staff.
Someone has gone home, to different CIS countries, someone right here, in the city of Zapolyarny, sells on the market. Of the 500 specialists, 100 remained by the start of the UNESCO program, and now even fewer. But we are able to perform the works won at the competition on the creation of a methodology for forecasting earthquakes.
In 2007, it became known that the well would be closed completely. Scientists tried to prevent this - they gave strong arguments why SG-3 is still useful. All in vain: the once high-profile project came to an end overnight.
Of course, well restoration is now a utopia. But even if we imagine that tomorrow it will be unmounted, the goal will remain the same. Although acquiring knowledge is not the same as throwing money down the drain. Exploration of the Earth's interior is a kind of investment. In correspondence with w3bsit3-dns.com, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences and Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Nikolai Evgenievich Kozlov expressed an opinion about the potential of the Kola Superdeep in our days:
From the point of view of science, the data obtained with the SG-3 can hardly be overestimated. And if it were suddenly restored and drilling continued, probably new, no less interesting materials would have been obtained. But, unfortunately, as far as I know, this is impossible in principle: the well, or rather what is left of it, as it seems to me, cannot be restored. Everything that could be destroyed has been destroyed …
And about a waste of money: China, for example, continues such research and plans to continue. They seem to know how to count money.
Just think about it: dissertations are still being defended based on the materials obtained thanks to the Kola Superdeep. It was not the first of its kind and will not be the last, but its depth and location make it unique. How many more discoveries are concealed by the bowels of the Baltic Shield? This we are unlikely to find out.
Whatever you assume, the reality is the same: the well, which is still important for science, lies in ruins. Now there is only rusty junk, attracting fans of fables about the well to hell. People often forget that there is no need to look for hell underground when it can be freely seen on the surface.
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