Sunday 23 May 2021, 00:10
Clicks in the eggshell
The interior of our planet has always intrigued people, with a symmetrical fascination on which the outdoor space practices on us. In addition, they traditionally placed the kingdom of hell, with their central heating from Magma, and there have also been people who have imagined civilizations that inhabit a so -called Hol Land, such as neighboring elusive with whom we do not maintain contact. In the same way that flying machines are invented to know the cosmos, The most direct method to know the guts of the world is to dig deep. In fact, you can still find a parallel more between the inside and the outside: while the forces of the Cold War had started at the Space Race, they also competed to pierce the deepest well, an attempt that has left us a few very remarkable holes when we appreciate them on our human scale. With the perspective of the planet, on the other hand, they are almost not -valuation in an atmosphere of 6,371 kilometers of radio. If the earth was an egg, we would continue to fight with the skin.
A microphone to take the earth
The first to reach at work were the Americans, at the beginning of the 1960s, with their Moelse project, which strived to cross the cortex (the outer layer of the earth) and reached the so -rammed discontinuity of Mohorovicic (the limit with the next layer, the mantle). They tried it at sea, because the Cortex is much nicer, but they were exhausted the financing in 1966, When they had reached a depth of 183 meters from the ocean bed, with another three and a half kilometers of water above it. In the late 80s, Europeans would also enter Liza, With a drilling in Germany that reached 9,000 meters And that is used today to test different measuring equipment and also for artistic activities, such as the sound recording made by the Dutch Lotte Geeven after picking up a microphone through the hole. But The most effective, or perhaps the most stubborn, were the Soviet, who started their superprofunda perforation in 1970 (This was called) on the Kola peninsula, near the border with Norway.
More heat than expected
The Soviets worked for two decades in their SuperProfunda -Born. In 1979 he had already become the deepest gap that was practiced by man, but They remained the 12,262 meters until 1989, that is, kilometer and peak more than the Mariana Pit, The deepest depression of the sea. From there they were impossible to continue: the temperature at that time already reached 180 degrees, much more than the 100 that scientists had predicted, and the heat damaged the equipment and gave the rocks a plastic consistency that was complicated to the minimum progress. Along the way they have made very interesting discoveries, such as The fossil micro -organisms with which they encountered about six kilometers deep. The expected findings were also important, but did not take place, as the basal rots predicted by the geologists and that did not appear.
That nothing in between, nothing comes out
The drilling was finally canceled in 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the gap (with a diameter of about 23 centimeters) remains the deepest in the world: some gas and oil farms have poured longer sources, but the path is less vertical and does not reach down. The facilities have been abandoned and today are the tourist destination for some curiosities -collectors, Although, logically, the only thing that is seen of the hole, the mouth is, properly insured with a lid so that “nothing can come in or leave”, because an article in ‘Popular Mechanics’ was ironic.
