Funny or Interesting Things

honeybee__12 wrote: »

While the U.S. and U.S.S.R. vied for space exploration supremacy during the Space Race, a different, less-publicized race took place between the two nation’s greatest drillers.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Americans and Soviets began planning separate efforts to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust.

The American “Project Mohole,” stationed off the Pacific coast of Mexico, was cut short in 1966 due to lack of funding but set an important precedent for future off-shore drilling programs.

From 1970 to 1994 the Soviets drill on the Kola Peninsula, chipped slowly away to create a Earth-shattering record at the time: the deepest hole in the world.
 The deepest hole is called “SG-3,” and though just nine inches in diameter, it extends down a staggering 7.5 miles.
That’s roughly a third of the way through the Baltic continental crust.

The most intriguing discovery made by the Kola borehole researchers is undoubtedly the detection of biological activity in rocks more than two billion years old.

While data produced by the Kola drilling project continues to be analyzed, the drilling itself was forced to stop in the early 1990s when unexpectedly high temperatures were encountered.
Also unexpected was a decrease in rock density after the first 14,800 feet.
Beyond this point the rock had greater porosity and permeability which, paired with the high temperatures, caused the rock to behave more like a plastic than a solid and made drilling near impossible.

iMago wrote: »

https://youtu.be/LtJQDNCyoJI