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Unexpected Things Encountered in the “Kola Pit”, One of the Deepest Holes Drilled on Earth

This human-made pit was made in Murmansk, Russia. This pit leading to the center of the Earth was known for many years as the deepest pit in the world. Known as the Kola Pit, this hole is 12,262 kilometers deep below the Earth's surface.
 Unexpected Things Encountered in the “Kola Pit”, One of the Deepest Holes Drilled on Earth
READING NOW Unexpected Things Encountered in the “Kola Pit”, One of the Deepest Holes Drilled on Earth

Do not be afraid of such a deep pit, because it is impossible to fall into this pit. Yes, it may be one of the deepest pits in the world, but its width is 23 cm in diameter. Therefore, there is no such thing as a normal person falling into a pit. This pit, which was built in about 20 years, was made for purely scientific purposes.

The researchers initially determined the hole to be around 14,500 meters. But the researchers later changed their minds and planned for the hole to be “as deep as possible.” But the scientists and engineers encountered something unexpected during the study.

The researchers faced high temperatures as the pit deepened, so it was decided to abandon the project.

12,000 km below the surface, the 2.7 billion-year-old rocks reached temperatures of around 180 degrees Celsius. This temperature was much higher than scientists had predicted. Excavation work became very difficult and costly as these high temperatures deform the drill bits and pipes. That’s why scientists, who could not cope with the heat any longer, put an end to the excavation work.

During the studies, scientists observed that the rocks became softer as they went deeper. The Russian scientists at Kola noted that rocks at these depths are more like plastic than rock. For scientists expecting to encounter a hard rock, these soft rocks were a surprising surprise.

The pit work was stopped in 1992 and the project site was abandoned ten years later. The Kola Superdeep well continued to hold the title of the world’s deepest hole until May 2008, but the 12,289-metre borehole drilled at Qatar’s Al Shaheen oil field took the record from Kola. Today, the 12,345-meter Offshore oil well near the Russian island of Sakhalin is the owner of this title.

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