Get in, we’re drilling a well to Hell!
Welcome to the first week of Don't Go Outside. This week, we're talking about the Kola superdeep borehole!
One day shortly after I got married (back in Bible times), I was strolling through a local mall which is now closed. I don’t remember if it was Christmastime or not. I don’t feel like it was. I do remember very distinctly how I was practically high from two iced coffees and three books from the bookstore.
Then my husband got a call.
“Check your phone,” he said in a very worried tone.
My uncle, who worked in the coal mines, was in an accident.
We needed to leave now. We needed to rush there. It was over an hour from where we were. My heart simultaneously entered tachycardia while it dropped like a lead anchor into my stomach.
I didn’t know the specifics, but I felt like this was the day I’d been preparing for my entire life.
My dad was a miner. So were both of my grandfathers, and obviously, most of my uncles and neighbors.
I feel like being a latch key kid that has a parent with a dangerous job affords you this rare admission into the grown up world; sometimes better but mostly for worse.
You hear things you really shouldn’t, like “oh they’re not running coal tonight because there was a fatality”.
Girl, what is a fatality? I’m 7 years old…
Focusing up though, all this serves as a sort of primer to my headspace. I was one of God’s favorites: born with both a crippling anxiety disorder and also a father who rode an elevator that took him 2100 feet underground every night into a world full of toxic gas & darkness. What a fantastic recipe!
Every day he made it home was a victory. I would say a small victory, but hell no. A very big one. Just repeated for me and my family so many times that you convince yourself that it’s small. It was big. It is big. My dad lived to retire. He gets his black lung exam every year and so far, no fucking whammies.
My grandfather wasn’t so lucky. He got black lung and later died prematurely of an aggressive form of throat cancer. My next door neighbor and surrogate grandfather was in an accident underground before I was born leaving him with only one leg. When I tell you he got after us just fine, I mean it. I was on the wrong end of that crutch several times. Oof.
And, as I mentioned up top, my uncle didn’t make it out unscathed.
When I got to the hospital the day of his accident, my family had formed a prayer circle in the ICU. His condition was so bad that they couldn’t move him to the nearest big city’s trauma unit, so they'd prepared us for his death.
Despite growing up with some pretty adverse circumstances, there was no way I was prepared to see the man who was my second father plugged up to all those machines.
I will offer y’all some relief and let you know that he has recovered.
A few heart surgeries and nearly a decade later, he is living his best life. He’ll see his youngest granddaughter get married next month. We’re good.
A few years ago though, I asked him if he remembered anything from that time, and how he managed to remain so carefree after going through something so dark.
His answer became one of my personal mantras.
He said he had faith that he would be okay because “if you put in, you can always get something out”.
He was referring to all those years he spent doing mine rescue. He was one of the first people they called in an emergency and later in his career even went on to train new rescuers.
You put in, you get out. It’s a simple but comforting concept. Like Social Security. Or, you’d hope, -every- -other- situation in life.
I’m very proud of my family’s contribution to society. They did a dangerous job to keep the lights on. They were union men who always stood for what was right.
But what if there were people digging deeper holes, somewhere else on earth, for literally no reason at all? No higher purpose, if any purpose at all.
I decided to put the moral of this story up top because now we
Enter
The
Darkness.
WELCOME TO DON’T GO OUTSIDE. WEEK ONE! SUPERDEEP BOREHOLES!
Would you be surprised if I told you I never understood the possible motivations of why I could be obsessed with superdeep boreholes until my 30s?
And I mean that.
I would spend hours online researching these crazy holes that go 7 or 8 miles down into the earth for essentially no purpose and I never stopped for even a second to consider “oh yeah, duh, everybody in my family is a mole person?”
Like come on. It was right there! Ehh, no one’s ever accused me of being bright.
I spent the first half of my career in deadend part-time office jobs, drenching my hyperfixations with Diet Coke and Wikipedia. Like these.
So what is a borehole? I guess the simplest way of describing it to people with healthy brains and productive time management skills would be to ask for you to imagine something.
Imagine a giant drill. A giant drill whose only goal was to drill to the center of the earth, Jules Verne style.
Sometimes the drill belongs to a country or state. Sometimes an energy company.
What’s important is… we’re drilling a hole to hell.
The Kola superdeep borehole in Siberia, the world’s deepest is nearly 8 miles deep.
12,262 metres.
40,230 feet.
7.619 miles down into the earth!
Drilling started in 1970, and nearly a decade later, in 1979, Russia had dug the deepest artificial point on earth.
It is a skinny little thing, only 9 inches in diameter, dug using the using the Uralmash-4E, and later the Uralmash-15000 series drilling rig. That last one was designed specifically for that purpose. Humans are wild. All the money and the custom made rigs were all in an effort to eclipse the world record held by the United States at the Bertha Rogers well in Washita County, Oklahoma. The Kola Superdeep Borehole got so damn deep that is penetrated (grow up) about a third of the way through the Baltic Shield continental crust, estimated to be around 35 kilometres (22 mi) deep, reaching Archean rocks at the bottom. NBD let’s crack the world open!
But I mean, y’all can read Wikipedia in your own time like I did.
The takeaway is that there was a space race on a different scale during the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, but this time it was to see who could go the deepest (grow up). Germany even got into it.
More recently, there’s a big ole hole in Doha, Qatar in the middle of an oil field too. They all claim it is to further research into earthquakes (like the San Andreas Fault Observatory does), but I mean obviously it was mostly just a pissing contest with the bonus of furthering oil drilling technology so we could totally tap the earth out. Huzzah!
The U.S. eventually spent the better part of the the 1980s and 90s drilling offshoots of the Bertha central line trying to catch up to what the Soviets had managed with Kola but we had no such luck.
I mean, 28,143 ft is absolutely nothing to turn your nose up at. It’s fucking terrifying if we’re being honest.
Maybe this is part of the reason my mind was so drawn to these things.
Deep. Dark. Extreme.
Just the thought of potentially seeing, hearing or examining shit that deep into the mantle of the earth gives me legit tingles down my spine.
For scale, here’s a visual to freak you out further:
She’s taller (deeper?) than Everest! They were digging a hole to hell!
That may be a silly way to describe it, but… look. Don’t take my word for it.
There was a hoax based on a scary story posted by a Norwegian Pentecostal church bulletin (I’m serious and those exist ig) in the 1970s that made it all the way to TBN.
Yes, that Trinity Broadcasting Network. With the preachers and the prosperity coffee talk. They decided to spook their loyal evangelical audience with tales of demons and hellish sounds emerging from the hole.
I’m so serious. Snopes calls it the Well to Hell hoax.
I didn’t know of this lore until a couple of years into my otherwise mundane fascination with the hole, but dear Lord. Literally.
There’s even been several international horror movies based on the Kola superdeep borehole. My friend Jeremy over at Dust On The VCR (dustonthevcr.substack.com, go subscribe!) will be happy to hear about that.
In 1992, the U.S. tabloid Weekly World News even published an alternative version of the original Well to Hell story, set in Alaska where 13 miners were killed after Satan came roaring out of hell. ROARING, GIRL.
Could you imagine??????? Seeing this in the grocery store checkout aisle????? I’m bereft!!!!
However silly and superstitious, I guess it is still comforting to know that the morbid curiosity is universally feared. And not just one of the many other unjustified fears that dangles on the untethered synapses of my mind.
But there’s plenty of time later for those.
That’s why I started this dang newsletter. Until next week, when we talk about my OCD & the largest plastic-bottomed lake in Europe! Yes, I’m serious.
If you wanna go even DEEPER (I’m so sorry omg) into superdeep holes or the hysteria surrounding it, here are some highly entertaining links below.
Thanks for your support, y’all!
Just don’t read these at bedtime! Shit, I should’ve led with that.
I’m reading Oil! right now so this was perfect timing.
Okay but I need to know about these borehole movies.