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American soccer is exploding.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and Chuck's here too.
And Jerry's here too, because this one's so exciting.
Jerry said, I wouldn't miss this one for the world.
And this is stuff you should know.
Unless I had some minor appointment or meeting that I could easily move.
It's so great that Jerry just doesn't talk on this, because we can say whatever we want and we can't hear what she's saying in response.
Yeah, it would be fun, as if we were doing our fun poking at Jerry sometimes and she just cut in and said go f yourself guys.
Right.
I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.
Maybe we can beep that out.
That'd be fun.
We'll see.
But yes, she's excited about this one, and she even said, it's not going to be boring, or is it?
And we said, Jerry, pipe down.
Boring.
Wasn't that a Simpsons thing?
Boring.
I don't know.
It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy.
Yeah, I feel like Reverend Lovejoy did that in a sermon one time.
That led them into like a flashback or something.
It's a very distant memory.
It sounds like you're talking about the Mr Sparkle episode, where Marge becomes the listen lady at church and Reverend Lovejoy is completely lost, like his.
His, I guess, pastoral sense.
And the flashback you're talking about is when he traces it back to the first time he met Ned Flanders, who came to him for advice because he'd just done the bump and his rear end touched the rear end of another young man and he was up in arms about it.
Maybe he was saying boring because it was a Ned Flanders flashback.
It's possible.
Somebody will know this one.
I'm pretty sure it was Lovejoy, though.
Okay.
At any rate.
Yeah, at any rate.
We should have said that in unison.
Oh, that would have been great.
We're talking today not about The Simpsons, although we just have, and that's great.
We're talking today about a different kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the United States.
Got a lot less press. way less press.
It got a lot less money and funding and attention and technology and engineers and brains thrown at it.
But I also wonder Chuck, if we downplay it because the USSR beat us so soundly at this particular race.
Maybe.
Yeah, that's possible because, you know, of course, we're not talking about going to outer space.
We're talking about boring deep into the earth and digging a deep hole.
And we're going to talk about that now in the form of the Kola borehole, K-O-L-A.
And this started in the 1960s.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, yes, I think the idea started in the 60s, but they started drilling in 1970.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves because the Soviets were actually following the American lead.
America made the first shot over the Soviets' bow by drilling into the earth first.
Yeah, there you go.
They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this.
That's right.
In 1958, we launched something called Project Mohole.
And this was like, hey, let's dig down to the mantle.
Let's get a sample off of Guadalupe Island.
Like, let's go through the ocean floor because the ocean's already deep.
So let's just go ahead and start down there.
And the name Project Moho is a bit of a sciencey nerdy joke that plays on the Moho discontinuity or discontinuity.
How would you say?
The second one.
Second one.
And that is the Moho discontinuity is the region where the crust and the mantle meet.
Right.
And they were.
I mean, this is theoretical.
We should say it's named after a guy named A.
I think it's Mohorovicic of Croatia.
Yeah.
1909, mind you, was studying seismic waves from earthquakes so closely that he realized that at some point in the Earth's crust they actually like speed up.
They hit some literal inflection point.
And he was like there's some sort of boundary there, maybe even a discontinuity, as Chuck will later say.
And he.
Well, it became.
I don't think he named it after himself, but it became called the Moho discontinuity, like you said.
It was hypothetical, it was theoretical.
But one reason they named it, that is because ultimately, the goal was to drill right through the crust into the mantle.
That's the money lithosphere.
Yeah, for sure.
And you know what?
Nothing turns me on more than scientifically speaking, than early science, where they someone got it right.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's fun to talk about bloodletting and stuff like that.
But I love it when somebody, like way before they know about this stuff, has an idea and it kind of bears out.
To be correct.
I just love that stuff.
So hats off to you, Croatian scientist whose name I'm not going to try.
If bloodletting is wrong, I don't want to be right, Chuck.
Very nice.
I also want to give a shout out to the group of scientists, the informal drinking group called the American Miscellaneous Society, or AMSOC.
Yeah, they seem fun.
They came up with this idea in the 50s and it was one of many ideas that they had, most of which were just totally ridiculous and outlandish, like towing icebergs to California to use for irrigation.
This one actually had legs, and it got funding from the National Science Association.
And they got to drilling, like you said, in Guadalupe.
And it actually got funding from the National Academy of Sciences and they started drilling in.
Well guess what?
The Gulf of the Pacific.
Oh, God.
Is Mexico an island?
Your desire for specificity gets you in so much trouble.
Okay.
Well, at any rate, they started drilling.
Yeah.
Wow, that felt really good.
I've never tried that before.
Huh.
Yeah, vagary is my secret weapon.
Okay.
Thanks for letting me in on it.
I think I've just turned over a new leaf.
Yeah, they got that funding.
They made it down about just over 600 feet, which is not too bad.
This, to me, is one of the more fun facts of the whole episode.
I thought you'd like this.
John Steinbeck, the author, went along to document it.
Like, who should we get?
I don't know.
Steinbeck's pretty good.
That's where he got the idea for the end of Mice and Men.
One of the engineers accidentally dropped a sample, a very precious sample.
And rather than let the rest of the crew kill the guy in a terrible fashion, he snuck up behind him and took his life.
That's good.
Wait, was Steinbeck the pearl?
Is that what his nickname was?
The Pearl of America?
No.
Did he write The Pearl?
Because that was about pearl diving.
So I'm pretty sure that was Steinbeck.
So he may obviously had some sort of interest in going under the sea.
He did, actually.
It's funny you say that because he was a, I think, a trained marine biologist, or he was planning on going into marine biology and never really lost his love of it.
Yeah, pretty cool.
Nice call, Chuck.
Awesome project.
They pulled the plug in 1966, or I guess rather they stuck in the plug in 1966.
Yeah.
When the U.S.
House of Representatives said no more, no more drilling.
And then, four years later, the Soviets set off to do a deep drilling attempt.
When they drilled into the earth in Murmansk, Russia.
This is near the Norwegian border, near the Barents Sea.
And this is it.
This is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a.k.a. the deepest hole ever dug by human beings.
Yeah.
Still.
Still, to this day.
Yeah.
And it's named Kola because it's on the Kola Peninsula.
K-O-L-A, did you spell it?
Yeah.
I love it.
It's worth spelling again.
And another time, K-O-L-A.
It's like a colonut.
Exactly.
The thing is, Chuck is for as stupendous an achievement as this is and if you're a geologist, if you're an earth scientist, basically of any sort, this is a stupendous achievement that they carried out in Soviet Russia in the 70s and 80s.
It's just been completely like left to rot.
Did you see those pictures of it now?
Yeah.
I mean, you'd walk right past the thing and not even know it's there.
Right.
And the reason why you could walk right past is because the hole I was going to say the whole hole which makes sense is only like nine inches in diameter.
I think that's 23 centimeters.
Yeah, 23 centimeters, right?
It's like I went caving that time and instead of walking into a big rocky cave I like crawled into a small hole in the ground.
Yeah.
I know.
But that's the same deal.
Like nine inches is very small.
It has got a plate secured over it with some old rusty bolts.
And I think you found out they even etched on top what it was, but they got the number wrong, right?
Yeah, as we'll see, the COLA super deep borehole got all the way down to 12262 meters into the Earth's crust.
And we'll tell you about just how deep that is, we'll put in perspective in a second.
But when they wrote down how deep it was, they transposed the last two numbers.
So they shorted it by 34, 36, 38 meters maybe, something around that.
Yeah, and you might be disappointed to know if you took a wrench out there and you're like I got to drop a rock in that thing just to see if I can hear anything and took that plate off.
Let's say you were able to.
You wouldn't be able to drop anything in it because of the Earth's movement over time.
It is no longer like, at least at that point, like a continuous hole.
It's kind of shifted and kind of caved in in places and is full of gunk.
It is.
And legend has it that if you had recorded the movements of the Earth over that time span and played it back at fast speed, you would hear the Earth going as it subsided the deepest hole in the planet.
The saddest of trombones.
Exactly.
All right.
So you promised to talk about how deep this thing was.
And in true stuff, you should know fashion.
We're going to have several examples, none of which are Big Macs, surprisingly.
No, but there is a Domino's pizza reference in there.
I was hoping to not mention that.
No, it's that specificity thing I have running through it.
I'm just going to say it.
The diameter of the hole is about as big around as a small piece from Domino's there.
That's right.
I think people are suspicious of all of our brand mentions, so I was trying to avoid those.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Come on, people.
Hey, you know, it's a thing.
So this thing is deep, deep, deep.
It is about 7.6 miles deep, about 12...
1,262 meters or 40,230 feet deep.
Like we said, the deepest hole ever.
It is deeper than the lowest point of the Mariana Trench.
That's a pretty fun one.
Sure.
You got a height perspective?
Height-wise, it's deeper than the highest point on Earth is tall, Mount Everest.
In fact, it's so much deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
You could put Mount Fuji on top of Mount Everest and the Kola borehole would still be deeper than those two stacked on top of one another.
Yeah.
So that's a deep thing, everybody.
Well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
There's one more that knocks my socks off.
Can I say it?
It's probably the one I scribbled through.
So, yes, let's hear it.
It is deeper than the height of the average cruising altitude of a commercial airliner, specifically Delta Airlines.
Yep.
I scratched right through that thing.
I was like, we don't need that many examples.
I like that one.
All right.
So this went down into the outermost layer of the Earth, which is continental crust.
That is like what we're standing on right now.
They wanted to reach the mantle.
With their technology, they thought they could get down to 9.3 miles, but only made it 7.6.
That's right, yes.
And 93 miles sounds like a really weird goal, but it turns out that they were going for 15 kilometers.
Yeah, but they thought that was, I guess, out of reach if they figured 9.3 was reasonable.
So, yeah, and there was an article I found.
It's called Going Deep, Excavation, Collaboration, and Imagination at the Cola Superdeep Borehole.
It was written by Charlotte Wrigley and published in Environment and Planning D, the journal in 2023.
And Charlotte Wrigley points out that the COLA super deep borehole raised more questions than answered them.
Because one of the things they thought is that this stuff was going to confirm all of the predictions that Earth scientists had made over time.
And the fact that they thought they were going to get down 15 kilometers and the reasons that they didn't get down that far.
Basically,
It's like a great example of what the Kola super deep borehole did, which was take science and churn it up like a huge swath of the earth during an earthquake.
Yeah, totally.
That's maybe a good time for a break.
Yeah, let's do that.
All right.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more on this deep, deep hole.
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
Okay, if you know me, you know this.
I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.
So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
We're gonna have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
We just have to find it.
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
American soccer is exploding.
The knockout rounds are here.
The U.S. won their group.
And now every match is win or go home.
Score!
USA!
I'm Tad Ramos.
And I'm Tom Bogert.
On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines.
I'm not worried about Pulisic.
I'm not worried about Balogun.
I'm not worried about McKinney.
My only concern is what happens in the back.
And give you the truth about the U.S. national team from inside the program.
It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals.
Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup.
We've got you covered.
USA!
Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogert and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
My first guest is Paris Hilton.
Shakira.
Luke and Yerin.
Samira and Gracie.
I'm so excited.
On a bouncy bed.
You have surprises.
Many surprises.
Welcome to Suite 305, where the group chat comes to life.
What up?
It's like a way to say, hello, friend.
Hello, best friend.
Hello, sister.
What up?
Mira, nunca lo había hablado con nadie.
Excepto con mis hijos.
Mis hijos sí saben.
Yes.
Sé mi amante.
Uf.
Uf.
Qué increíble.
Ya, la telenovela.
You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst.
I love it.
No hay alguien que te falta.
Como que tú dices, me gustaría colaborar con esta persona.
This is Suite 305.
Listen to Suite 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So Chuck, we should probably just do a quick primer of eighth grader science, maybe of the layers of the Earth, if you'll bear with me.
Sure.
So you've got the outermost layer, the crust made up of the continental crust, which is what we stand on, and the oceanic crust, which is at the bottom of the sea.
Beneath that, you've got the mantle.
And by the way, the crust averages about 25 miles or 40 kilometers thick.
After that, you've got the mantle, way thicker, 1800 miles thick.
Then you hit the outer core.
You hit the inner core, which has a diameter of about 1230 miles or 1980 kilometers, which happens to be about the distance from Topeka Kansas, to Klondike Bluffs, Utah.
Okay.
You said that's the radius?
That is, no, that's the diameter.
Oh, diameter.
The full diameter of the inner core.
Gotcha.
And then possibly there's also a super liquid inner, inner core that represents the center, most point of Earth.
That's right.
And that's where Ronnie James Dio resides.
Oh, yeah?
I think so.
I've got to give an obligatory shout out to the greatest tattoo ever.
Oh, okay.
Remember that one of Dio on somebody's forearm?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, there's a tattoo out there of Ronnie Dio making like the devil horns.
But the perspective is done in a way that it looks like Dio's arm turns into the person with the tattoo's arm and finger.
So they make the devil horns and it looks like Ronnie Dio is the perspective is just that amazing.
Yeah.
The only problem is it involves the armpit.
You know?
Yeah.
It's really kind of the worst part of the body to me.
The armpit?
Not a fan.
To me, there's other parts that are grosser.
Like the butthole?
Sure.
Unless it's been recently bleached.
Between the toes?
Oh, my God.
Coming from the guy who just said butthole, now I'm offended.
I got that from Bruno.
Remember the Sacha Baron Cohen movie, Bruno?
Yeah, you got what?
Anal bleaching.
Oh, is that the first time you heard of that?
Yeah, I hadn't heard of it before.
Oh, okay.
Man, this is a great episode.
I mean, we are talking about super deep holes.
So what we're trying to say is, while it is impressive to go down 76 miles that is like about a third of the Earth's crust alone
So they were trying to get to the mantle, and that's just...
I mean, that doesn't seem like it's possible that that could ever happen.
And it took years and years to do it.
They started this project on May 24th, 1970.
And by 1979, they had broken all digging records.
By 1989, they had reached that depth of 40,230 feet, which was kind of it.
The project was open for a little while longer after that.
But for reasons we will go over.
Soon you'll learn why.
That was basically about as deep as they could go in 1989.
They were like, we can't get any deeper.
Yeah, the one that it's like.
The reverse perspective that gets me is that they dug 02 of the entire distance to the center point of the Earth.
So, like you said, it's impressive in some terms.
In other terms, it's just kind of a stupid hole, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's if you're wondering, like, why would they even do this?
What's down there?
There's a lot of reasons.
There are a lot of deep holes all over the world.
Most of those are for, like you know, mineral extraction or fossil fuel extraction or metals.
You know ores things like that.
There's the 100 year old Bingham Canyon copper mine in Salt Lake City.
Yeah, pretty great.
Three quarters of a mile deep, but two and a half miles across.
So that is a no small pizza.
Now, there's another one called the Big Hole.
It's in South Africa.
It belongs to the Kimberley Diamond Mine.
It's one of the largest holes in the world, with the caveat of holes that were dug by human hands and no machinery.
Which sounds pretty impressive, unless you realize that you can threaten to cut off those people's hands if they don't use them to dig.
Then you can get it done.
And I'm quite sure that's what happened.
Yeah, I did not even look into that.
And I just had great certainty that that was a completely exploitive experience.
Well, even if it's not true, we should be forgiven, because we're talking about South Africa, diamond mines and giant holes dug by hand.
Yeah, I'm sure.
It's a pretty reasonable surmization.
Yeah.
Surmization?
I don't know.
I love it.
All right.
So that's one reason why you can dig down, is you know for minerals and fossil fuels and stuff like that?
But you can also just learn a lot about science.
And we did learn a lot about science through.
You know, the Soviets did and we did through our deep holes.
But, you know, like you mentioned, earthquakes, obviously geohazards.
They ended up learning a lot about that stuff.
And we'll detail that a little bit.
Geothermal heat and energy is another big one.
Oh, I don't know, maybe about climate change and what's happened in the past that you could find from digging deep.
Or maybe just like hey, we know a lot more about outer space than we do about what's under our feet.
So let's get down there and see what we can learn.
Yeah.
The place that they were digging.
So like we usually dig ice cores to kind of get an idea of climate change.
Yeah.
That's actually in the fairly recent past.
We're talking on the order of tens of hundreds of thousands of years.
Yeah.
The crust that they were digging into is pre-Cambrian, meaning that it came together and was formed from anywhere between the origin of Earth to 538 million years ago.
So it is super old.
There's a lot of secrets that could be unlocked here just by boring into it and looking at what comes up right.
So that's a good reason.
Also, fossil fuels.
You really can't look past, this is the 70s and 80s, so they're one of the stated goals of the KSB. was to basically figure out new techniques for drilling super deep oil wells, essentially, because they said that it would be a great benefit to mankind if we can learn how to dig out fossil fuels that are deeper that we can't currently reach.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, I mentioned promise of earthquake talk.
They did just come up a lot lately again, but they did learn a lot about that stuff.
Like, if you go really deep into these spot lines, you can detect, you know, these tiny minute quakes that you don't even feel topside where we are.
And all of that is usually about just learning how to get more accurate predictions in the future.
They do computer simulations and stuff, but they need data input to do those simulations.
Right.
And these holes give you great data for that kind of thing.
They also have figured out how to use all of that seismographic data to basically turn the resonance, or the way they resonate through Earth into images of inner Earth itself.
And that really kind of – I mean you can get – if you're looking at mega colossal geology, there's no reason, I would say, to dig anymore.
Like if we can do that kind of thing, I mean dig, to put you know –, deeper and deeper seismographs, but not to necessarily find out what inner Earth is like, because we can image it like that.
In the same way that if you ever watch one of those cool archaeological shows on BBC, sometimes they'll have what looks like a tamper, like a walk-behind tamper.
Mm-hmm.
But it has a shotgun shell that you put into it, and you shoot the shotgun shell.
Yeah.
It's like a seismographic imager and it shows you what's buried beneath the ground in that field or whatever.
This is the same thing, except they're taking the data not from the resonance from a shotgun shell, but from the resonance of earthquakes in Earth, and turning those into images.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's super cool.
Yeah.
And you know, we also want to just like pull stuff out of there and see what it looks like, what's going on down there, like what our deep, deep crust looks like when –.
You know, they bring stuff out.
It's generally pretty crumbly by that point and kind of falls apart because of atmospheric pressure changes and stuff like that.
So you know, getting those pictures of what things look like in their sort of undisturbed state is beneficial.
Right.
And if you're like, all these seem kind of flimsy holes, are they're super deep holes are the greatest example of humans' curiosity, just for the sake of knowing something new.
Yeah.
Then you'll find just about anywhere.
Yeah.
Don't stifle that, people.
No.
Get with the program.
So another question you might have is, why did it take so long?
And why is it so hard to do?
And why aren't we able to just go deeper and deeper and deeper?
Like why they have to stop?
Kind of all those big questions.
Right.
And it's, you know, they didn't realize until they got started.
I don't think they thought it was going to be a cakewalk, but...
They didn't realize until they really started digging down there that it's not the easiest thing in the world to do and there's a lot of complications that can arise.
They didn't at first.
You found this YouTube site called Half as Interesting that were talking about the drill bits.
Like, they did a great job through granite.
They have, you know, it's like a boring drill bit.
It's like a, you know, like a windy cone with like teeth on the outside of it to, you know, to bore a hole.
It's kind of stuff they used to like bore subway tunnels and, you know, all kinds of tunnels.
But in this case, they were going straight down.
Those can only work for about four hours until you need to replace that bit, like the bit wears off.
And that's only about 30 feet or so, depending on where you're digging and how hard that rock is.
And then you can't just pop it off like a drill.
You get from the hardware store and pop on another one.
Those bits took, you know, sometimes eight hours or more. to change over.
Then you start drilling again.
And then once they hit about 4.3 miles, it was pretty smooth sailing up into that point.
Then it got much more dense.
And then things got just really, really tough at that point.
Yeah.
The density of the rock really presented like a big problem for them.
Like up to that point, like you said, it was pretty easy.
It was just monotonous.
Now it was really hard.
They were on a frontier of vertical underground hole digging.
And the reason why the density of the rock proved to be problematic is – the denser rock would just push the drill bit over into less dense rock.
So it made it really hard to keep going straight down because the drill bit It needs to get purchased, but it's way easier to get purchased in less dense rock than the dense rock.
It's trying to go directly vertically through.
That created also a lesser known thing about the Kola Superdeep borehole and that is.
It is not a single straight vertical shaft.
Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way.
Like they just drilled straight down.
But when they encounter that really really tough rock, the drill bit will like get kicked to the side.
Yeah.
Starts going a different way.
You know, they tried to, you know, that presents problems in and of itself.
Like they tried to use steel pipes to reinforce the sides as they went.
Right.
A la Charlie Brunson in The Great Escape.
But the deeper they went, those pipes, you know, were having trouble withstanding the pressure.
So they might break or they might kick out of line, and then they have to fill that hole up to where they were, go back above it and then drill down around it.
And so the...
You know, it looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down.
And you know, if they had too much like a drill bit broke off completely, or maybe besides that, piping caved in too much and they couldn't get around it.
They would have to go on like a fishing expedition to try and get that stuff out.
And that would that would knock them offline for days at a time.
Yeah, the article by Charlotte Wrigley says that one of their fishing trips took five years.
Five years.
And so to get around the rock and also to keep from just standing around for five years.
They would start another hole.
Yeah.
But the reason why everybody calls it the super deep bore hole, not bore holes, is because there is one central shaft and then the other holes branch off of that.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
So they the depth that they got to 12,262 meters.
That's the depth, the actual length that they drilled all over the places.
I'm not I didn't see the actual length, but it seems like it's a lot more than that.
Yeah, for sure.
So they still, they kind of figured out a workaround for the rock density problem.
And then, I think, at about 10000 feet, less than or just over 3000 meters, they encountered an issue that they couldn't, they found, they eventually couldn't overcome.
Yeah.
And that was temperature.
They kind of had guesstimated correctly, up into that point, what the temperature was about going to.
You know what it was they thought it was going to be at least.
And they were like, that'll be fine.
But once they reached that point, there was a big jump.
It went from what was the initial number like 214 or so degrees, all the way up to 356 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius.
And that was about 12 clicks down, about seven and a half miles.
And as you heard at the beginning, it only went down 7.6 miles.
So it was that it was the heat that got him.
The heat.
My God, the heat.
Not even the humidity.
The heat.
Right.
Although we will find it's possible that it's humid down there.
Oh, what a tease.
That's a really great example of how the super deep borehole, like, rewrote science.
They mapped it all out.
They're like we're going to get to 15 kilometers because we'll be able to withstand the temperatures until then.
And then all of a sudden it got way hotter, way faster.
So much so that basically what happened with the pressure and the temperature together turned the rock in that area essentially plasticky and not even like a hard plastic, like a Clorox bleach bottle.
It was like a squishy plastic.
Yeah.
And it was basically like nailing Jell-O brand gelatin to the wall.
That was what they were trying to do at that point.
Yeah.
So, I mean, at that point it was net.
It was over.
They realized that they had gone as far as they could go.
That was 1989, like I said at the beginning.
They kept trying for another few years, I think until 1992.
Yeah.
And then they were like, yeah, this is really over.
And I think the whole project – was officially sealed in 2005.
And but I mean, they had a lot of employees and stuff, you know, that were on the books.
I think they weren't even paying them for a while, right?
Right.
I think at its peak, there were like 700 people who were employed there.
If you look at pictures of the place when it was in full swing, it looks like a huge factory with one single giant smokestack.
And that's actually where the derrick for the drill bit went.
But it's like a little mini town almost.
But as it got shut down further and further and they finally fully mothballed it in 2008, those last few employees yeah, they hadn't been paid in six months.
But the reason why it really stopped in 1992 is because they had bigger fish to fry, which was their country had dissolved.
And now they had to figure out where to get funding from.
And it turned out that none of the oligarchs were in any particular mood to keep funding the super deep borehole, especially because it hadn't gotten anywhere in three or four years.
Yeah, it was a.
You know, any stagnant project like that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shudder, I think.
Yeah, unfortunately so.
All right.
Maybe we should take a break and we'll talk about what we learned from this super deep borehole.
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All right.
So we actually discovered a lot, scientifically speaking, by going down that low.
The first thing they did was like well, I guess let's do the obvious thing and change our temperature maps, because now we know at what point it gets like super, super hot.
So.
Who's got an eraser?
Ivan, you have an eraser.
You have the only eraser in the room.
Step forward and change those numbers.
And they're like, that's a great start.
And let's move on from here.
Right.
So that was one thing.
They also disproved something that had been around since the 30s.
So we talked about the Moho discontinuity which is between the mantle and the crust, way further down than they went.
But they had expected to go through another discontinuity that was in the upper crust.
It was upper crust.
The Conrad discontinuity, which was also based on the same thing this guy Conrad, paying attention to seismographic waves suddenly accelerating or speeding up when it hit this one point in the crust.
It's like there's a discontinuity there.
I predict that it's a difference between granite and basalt, that we've got the granite up top and then it transitions into basalt and where they meet, that's that discontinuity.
And it turned out that that was not correct.
And they were kind of mean about it.
They called Conrad's descendants and told them and mocked them over the phone.
Yeah.
Well, I thought it was Conrad Bain and that they called Todd Bridges.
His heir?
Victor Conrad.
You know what just occurred to me?
I believe when I said discontinuity, I bet you that's how the Brits say it.
I'll bet you're right.
I'd love to hear from our Brit friends about that.
I would love to hear that, too.
We ought to ask Kyle.
Yeah.
But then we'd have to send a voice message.
And I wonder what Kyle sounds like, actually.
I wonder what all of our writers sound like.
We know what Dave sounds like because we met him.
Yeah.
That's a great question.
You just blew my top.
What if, like...
We love Livia so much.
What if we got in touch with Livia and she was like, gentlemen!
She was like a Julia Child or something.
That would be so fun.
It would be quite surprising.
All right.
So you teased liquid very cheekily earlier and they discovered that there was liquid water down there like much, much deeper than they thought water could exist.
They found these cracks that had saline filled water and they were like this this shouldn't be here.
This is crazy.
Like liquid is actually flowing down here. the Soviets like release that information.
And most of the world at first was like, yeah, right.
Like, we're going to buy that coming from you.
Right.
So yeah, the first 14 years, from 1970 to 1984, the USSR, which was very famous for keeping its scientific progress and findings secret.
It didn't share anything about this.
I'm not even sure the outside world knew that they were digging a hole.
And then in 1984, at a geological conference, like a world geological conference that they actually held in Moscow, they announced that they had dug the world's deepest hole and blew everyone away.
And it seems like the reason that they held this conference in 1984 was that they just had— dug the world's deepest hole and they wanted to tell everybody.
Yeah.
But it's kind of funny that they didn't believe certain parts of it because it was coming from the former Soviet Union, you know.
Right.
Well, this is full on Soviet Union, too, in 1984.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
But but yeah, they were like, how how would this even happen?
Like, explain to us how there's water.
Yeah.
So what they found out was that well, at first they thought that it was squeezed out of crystals, perhaps.
It's a pretty good guess.
But they found out the opposite was true because a study in 2023 they found out that when these continental plates subduct which we've talked a lot about lately, like go under one another and into the mantle in this case, they take water with them along the way and that can make it all the way to that outer core.
It interacts with that molten iron, I think and creates this kind of filmy gook between the core and then that presses into crystals.
Right.
Did you know that you could press water into crystals?
I didn't know any of this stuff.
No, I also didn't know you could get water from crystals.
But think about, like the mind boggling pressure that suggests are going on at this point in the earth.
You know
Yeah, for sure.
It's so cool.
Probably the biggest thing that everybody's socks were knocked off by was that they were like oh yeah, by the way, seven kilometers down, almost four and a half miles.
Under the Earth's surface, we found marine organism fossils dating back like two billion years.
Top that, comrades.
Pretty fun.
And I bet they were spooky looking like.
You know, I saw a garfish the other day when I was paddle boarding in a lake.
And I almost fell off because I looked down and it was right at the surface on my left.
And, you know, a garfish, this was like two and a half feet long.
Yeah.
I reacted with such a start.
I went, oh, my God, that I lost my balance and almost fell off the paddleboard.
Man.
And but, and then I had a fear of.
You know, this thing was some prehistoric creature that was going to attack me once I was in the water, which is, of course, not true.
That thing was out of there the second it saw me.
Right.
But I just imagine these fossils down there.
I mean, these things had to have like teeth.
They had to be creepy, right?
I don't know.
I didn't see any pictures of them.
Two billion years ago.
I'm not sure.
I've got a picture in my mind.
It looks like an alligator gar.
Okay.
That's great.
Let's go with that.
All right.
But the thing is is this doesn't suggest, as a lot of sites who sensationalize this super deep borehole, as we'll see, this doesn't mean that these things were ever dwelling like four and a half miles beneath the Earth's surface.
Right, right, right, right.
These were embedded two billion years ago and then carried down through the cross toward the mantle as part of that amazing plate tectonic process that keeps the Earth going.
Yeah.
I mean, what I wonder is if I mean, this was started in 1970, discontinued in 1989.
That was a long time ago.
And I wonder if it's possible with today's technology to reach the mantle and if anyone is interested in that anymore.
I wondered if it was – I think I'm sure that there are geologists and scientists who are still quite interested in doing that.
Well, I know they want to.
Right.
They want to.
The funding dollars.
Exactly.
Yeah, because I don't know that there's much – much to be gained from reaching the mantle if you're a fossil fuel company.
If you're not getting money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it from fossil fuel companies.
I would estimate fund 90% of the holes that are being dug around the world right now.
They're like, is there a giant bag of money down there?
Exactly, yeah.
They're like, no, but... Not exactly.
Well, you've lost my ear.
Yeah, they're like, get rid of this guy.
So, yes, though, it's possible that some scientists will make it to the mantle.
And the reason why is because they will be drilling not through, you know, super thick parts of the crust, but but thin, thin parts of the oceanic crust.
Right.
And that counts.
It definitely counts because you're still reaching the mantle.
Yeah, exactly.
No, there's some places where the crust is so thin.
How thin is it?
It's so thin, it's only five and a half kilometers thick.
And that is, yeah, that's, you know, almost a third of the depth of the Cola Superdeep borehole.
Yeah, that's 1960s level digging.
Exactly.
So there was actually a group that I guess was attempting that.
They dug in a site off the coast of Costa Rica.
They dug hole 1256D.
They need to step up their naming convention, I think.
Maybe that stands for dominoes.
It probably doesn't since who sponsored it.
The Noid was on board.
Yeah.
In the early 2000s they started digging and I guess the Noid got bored and stopped giving them money.
Yeah, yeah.
How far did they get?
Stopped at 1.25 kilometers.
Which is so shallow, we're not even going to bother translating that into miles.
Exactly.
But kind of one of the fun things is they—
They removed an intact piece of crust and I guess dipped it in some marinara.
I couldn't resist.
This went so off the rails with the Domino's theme that I really tried to avoid and then embraced.
If you like their marinara, you should try their garlic butter dipping sauce.
Man, why don't they sponsor us?
I don't know.
They really should.
I wish these were ads, everybody.
I would probably do Domino's ads for free pizza.
I am ashamed.
Well, not ashamed.
I'm proud to say maybe I haven't had a Domino's pizza since probably college.
That's our go-to pizza if we get giant chain pizza.
Really?
Yeah.
I still love Domino's.
I guess I don't get any giant chain pizza, not as a stand.
We just have so many good pizzerias in Atlanta all over the place.
Yes, that is true.
There are not as many in Florida.
Okay.
I don't know why, but there's not.
But, yes, Atlanta is filthy rich with really good pizza places.
I thought you were going to say that, like Yumi and Momo, wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get there in 30 minutes.
Right, or it's free.
I'm hungry now, Josh.
You know that.
Yeah, no, there's just not that many around here.
All right.
Well, maybe we can take a meeting with sales and turn this into liquid gold.
Yeah, can I have your free dominoes if that's how they pay us?
Okay, sweet.
We should mention this last little addendum.
It was kind of fun.
The Germans, of course.
They tried to dig a deeper hole in the 90s and they actually got to some higher temperatures.
Their bits... the German bits were able to withstand 500 degrees Fahrenheit or 260 degrees Celsius.
So that was a big breakthrough.
But they stopped at about 5.6 miles down or 9 kilometers.
But the cool part about this is they got a Dutch artist named Lotte Geven I'm not sure if that's pronounced right.
She lowered her microphone down in there, obviously protected by heat shields and stuff like that.
Sure.
Dropped it down, that German borehole, and picked up a very rumbling sound that science still cannot explain.
And she said it made her feel very small.
First time in my life this big ball that we live on came to life and it sounded haunting.
And she said some people thought it sounded like hell or like the planet was breathing.
So it's like you know that came from an old Russian sort of suspicion that they were digging into hell.
Right.
Yeah, there was an urban legend that started about the time they stopped digging at the borehole.
That said that the reason that they stopped digging was because they had punctured through the roof of hell.
And that somebody had lowered a microphone down and they captured the sounds of tormented souls in hell screaming.
And there are actual YouTube videos that present this seriously.
And you can go hear it.
And it's the most ridiculous thing you'll hear today.
But...
Also want to point out that, what is it, Lottie Girvin?
Girvin?
Girvin?
Yeah, keep it.
You said that scientists can't explain the sound that she actually did record.
That's not to say it's a supernatural sound.
There's so many processes going on down there and we so little understand that part of the earth we can't say what makes that sound.
But we think it's a pretty cool sound, and maybe someday we will be able to explain it.
What they are quite sure about is that it is not the sounds of hell.
Yeah, because that's not a real place.
Yeah.
You should go listen to our episode on hell, people.
It was a pretty good one.
Yeah.
You know, I imagine there's just sounds like a groan or you know, something moving around probably makes a sound right.
Yeah.
It sounds really, really industrial, but there's no pattern to it.
So like a dispatterned industrial sound is what it sounds like.
And it's still, it's pretty faint.
I bet some German musician turned that into a beat or something.
Right.
Yeah.
Let's see.
I think that's about it.
Yeah, that's about it.
Great.
Okay.
Well, that was the Cola Super Deep Borehole, everybody.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Sorry for the anal bleaching references.
And I guess since I mentioned anal bleaching again, it's time for Listener Mail.
In fairness, you can't talk about the Cola Super Depot hole without talking about that.
Agreed.
You know?
All right.
I'm going to call this feedback from the MASH episode.
Hey, guys.
Thank you for the episode on MASH.
I was seven years old in 1972 and I really loved the show so much that I learned to play the theme song on the piano.
My parents were too happy to find out that the song discussed suicide, but I don't even think I knew what that was at the time.
Also, there was at least one episode because you guys talked about the camp moving where there was a bug out, where the camp moved closer or farther from the front lines.
And we got someone else that wrote in that said the same thing.
The joke on the show was that it was kind of exactly the same.
Okay. because they clearly didn't move the set.
And then Dana Carson from Cleveland also says this it never occurred to me actually, that BJ and Hawkeye were alcoholics.
I just assumed they drank to pass the time.
Yeah, sure.
Just like alcoholics.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I threw that word around, you know, it was just sort of supposed to be funny.
Maybe they were just enjoyed drinking in the hellish war they were in to pass the time.
Yeah, I think it was a device to just show like you had to self-medicate, or else you'd go crazy from the horror of the whole thing.
And that is Dana Carson from Cleveland, who says in a PS I've been to Toledo and Tony Paco's many times.
Awesome.
Way to go, Dana.
Right?
Dana.
Great.
Thanks a lot, Dana.
There's actually a Dana Corporation around Toledo, if I'm not mistaken.
Maybe it's named after you, Dana.
You should go find out.
Cool.
If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo, say like Libby or Owens or Jeep...
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American soccer is exploding.
The knockout rounds are here.
The U.S. won their group, and now every match is win or go home.
I'm Tab Ramos.
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On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines.
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Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup.
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