Kola: The World’s Deepest Hole

Summary

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Stuff You Should Know: "Kola: The World’s Deepest Hole"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: July 7, 2026
Episode Theme:
An entertaining, in-depth exploration into the story of the Kola Superdeep Borehole—history’s deepest manmade hole. Josh and Chuck discuss the Cold War-era race to drill into the Earth’s crust, the scientific discoveries made, technical and physical barriers encountered, and the enduring curiosity behind humanity’s drive to dig deeper.

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Main Theme and Purpose

The episode delves into humanity’s quest to understand what lies beneath our feet, focusing on the Cold War competition between the U.S. and USSR to drill the deepest possible hole into the Earth—culminating in the Kola Superdeep Borehole project. With characteristic humor and plenty of fun tangents, Josh and Chuck examine why these projects were launched, what was discovered (and disproven), and why such an undertaking is both a feat of science and a monument to human curiosity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Cold War Rivalry—But Not in Space

• Competing in the Underground: Instead of the "space race," the U.S. and USSR engaged in a "deep drilling" race.
  • "We're talking today about a different kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the United States." (Josh, 03:34)
• The U.S. Fires the First Shot: Project Mohole (1958) on Guadalupe Island, aiming to reach the Earth's mantle via ocean crust (Chuck, 04:54).
• Project Mohole Explained:
  • It was named for the "Moho Discontinuity" (the boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle), named after Croatian scientist Mohorovičić (Josh, 05:33-05:45).
  • Fun fact: John Steinbeck documented the Mohole expedition (Chuck, 08:13).

2. The Soviets Dig Deep: The Kola Superdeep Borehole

• Drilling Began in 1970 near Murmansk, Russia on the Kola Peninsula (Josh, 09:47).
• Why So Unimpressive to See in Person?
  • The borehole is only 9 inches (~23 cm) wide; it’s capped off and neglected today (Josh, 10:30).
  • "You walk right past the thing and not even know it's there." (Chuck, 10:26)
• Just How Deep Was It?
  • Final depth: 12,262 meters (about 7.6 miles/40,230 feet)—deeper than the Mariana Trench, higher than Everest stacked with Fuji, and deeper than an airliner's cruising altitude (Josh & Chuck, 12:55-13:56).
• A Tangled, Christmas Tree–Shaped Hole:
  • Due to drilling issues, it’s not a single straight shaft but more like a trunk with branching offshoots (Josh & Chuck, 30:08–31:37).

3. Why Drill So Deep?

• Scientific Curiosity:
  • Learn about earthquakes, Earth's heat, plate tectonics, and even climate history from ancient rocks (Chuck, 24:22).
  • The Kola borehole drilled into pre-Cambrian crust—hundreds of millions to billions of years old (Josh, 24:34).
• Resource Extraction:
  • Technical breakthroughs for deeper fossil fuel exploration were an explicit goal (Josh, 25:27).
• Earth Sciences:
  • Deep holes let us test seismic theories, image the interior of the planet, and collect ancient materials (Chuck & Josh, 25:27–27:33).

4. The Technical Challenge: Why We Don’t Drill Deeper

• Drill Bit Breakdown:
  • Drill heads needed replacement after only ~30 feet—an 8-hour process each time (Chuck, 28:00).
• Rock Density Dilemma:
  • Dense rocks diverted bits; the hole veered and required “fishing expeditions” to retrieve broken gear—one involving five years’ delay! (Josh, 31:08)
• Intense Pressure and Heat:
  • At ~7.6 miles, rock temperatures were 180°C/356°F—softening the rock to a plastic/jelly-like state (Chuck, 32:15; Josh, 33:03–33:49).
• Project Stagnation:
  • Collapsing USSR and lack of funding led to shutdown (Josh, 34:17). Officially sealed in 2005, totally mothballed by 2008 (Josh, 35:06).

5. What Was Discovered? What Changed in Science?

• Temperature Models Shattered:
  • It got much hotter much faster than anticipated, requiring new geologic models (Chuck, 38:50).
• No “Conrad Discontinuity”:
  • A predicted granite-to-basalt transition in the crust was NOT found. A long-held geoscience theory debunked (Josh, 39:20).
• Unexpected Liquid Water:
  • Salty water was discovered deep underground, revising theories of plate tectonics and water subduction (Chuck, 41:02; Josh, 43:03).
• Ancient Marine Fossils:
  • Microfossils of single-celled marine organisms—2 billion years old—found 7 km down. These were carried by plate tectonics, not original dwellers of such depths (Chuck & Josh, 43:19–44:51).

6. Could We Reach the Mantle?

• Still Out of Reach—But Maybe Someday:
  • Modern ocean drilling may reach the mantle through thinner oceanic crust (Chuck & Josh, 45:04–46:26).
  • Example: Hole 1256D near Costa Rica (but only got to 1.25 km) (Josh, 47:00; Chuck, 47:26).

7. Legends, Myths & Sonic Mysteries

• Hell at the Bottom?
  • Longstanding urban myths claimed the Soviets heard the "sounds of hell" (wailing souls) through the borehole mic—debunked and mocked by hosts (Josh, 49:58–51:03).
• Real Sonic Recordings:
  • The German deep drilling project (1990s) recorded rumbling, unexplained sounds—powerful but naturally occurring (Chuck, 48:47; Josh, 50:37).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The thing is, Chuck, for as stupendous an achievement as this is ... it's just been completely like left to rot." – Josh Clark [10:02]
• "You walk right past the thing and not even know it's there." – Chuck Bryant [10:26]
• "They dug 0.2% of the entire distance to the center point of the Earth. ... In some terms and other terms, it's just kind of a stupid hole, you know?" – Josh Clark [22:08]
• "Super deep holes are the greatest example of humans curiosity just for the sake of knowing something new." – Josh Clark [27:33]
• "It was the heat that got 'em ... Not even the humidity. The heat." – Chuck Bryant [32:54]
• "They encountered an issue that they eventually couldn’t overcome ... the heat." – Josh Clark [32:54]
• "The biggest thing that everybody’s socks were knocked off by was ... almost four and a half miles under the Earth's surface, we found marine organism fossils dating back like 2 billion years." – Josh Clark [43:19]
• (On the myth of the hole to Hell:) "There are actual YouTube videos that present this seriously ... but what they are quite sure about is that is not the sounds of hell. Yeah." – Josh Clark [50:37–51:03]

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• 03:34 – 06:30 — Context: Cold War drilling race & origins of Project Mohole
• 09:47 – 15:24 — The Kola Superdeep Borehole: Soviet triumph, specs, neglected site
• 18:59 – 21:37 — Earth's layers primer; scale of Kola achievement
• 24:22 – 27:33 — Why dig deep? Science, resources, and curiosity
• 28:00 – 33:49 — Technical barriers: drill bits, rock problems, heat
• 33:49 – 35:06 — Project shutdown, loss of funding, and eventual closure
• 38:50 – 44:51 — Scientific discoveries: temperature, liquid water, ancient fossils
• 45:04 – 47:26 — Attempts to reach the mantle via oceanic crust holes
• 48:47 – 51:28 — Sounds from the deep: German project; Hell legend; scientific skepticism

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Tone and Language

• Conversational, full of jokes and pop culture asides (Simpsons, Domino’s pizza, John Steinbeck, and even anal bleaching).
• Enthusiastic for weird science and impressive human feats: "I love it when somebody, way before they know about this stuff, has an idea and it kind of bears out to be correct." – Chuck Bryant [06:30]
• Candid about the limits and sometimes the absurdity of these epic undertakings.

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Conclusion

This episode is a celebration of curiosity—a look at what happens when nations devote huge resources to drilling in search of knowledge rather than mere treasure. The tale of the Kola Superdeep Borehole is both a scientific milestone and a cautionary tale about our ability to literally dig ourselves into unforeseen complexity. Along the way, Josh and Chuck keep listeners entertained and eager to learn, reminding us that the greatest discoveries often emerge from our willingness to venture into the unknown—no matter how deep, or how hot, it gets.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just set yourself up for failure.

[Mc Jin]

I've never heard you tell this story.

[Josh Clark]

I've never told this story.

[Mc Jin]

This must have been tucked deep, deep in the Jeremy Lynn file. My name is Mc Jin. Excited to tell you about Laugh, but not least, I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard. Laugh harder. Listen. And last but not least, with McGin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

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 I wouldn't miss this one for the world. And this is stuff you should know,

[Chuck Bryant]

unless I had some minor appointment or meeting that I could easily move.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it would be fun. As if we were doing our fun poking at Jerry sometimes and she just cut in and said, go yourself, guys.

[Josh Clark]

Right? I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe we can beep that out. That'd be fun.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Mc Jin]

Boring.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wasn't that a Simpsons Thing.

[Michael Rapoport]

Boring.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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, 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. His rear end touched the rear end of another young man and he was up in arms about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, it didn't. Yeah, it didn't. We should have said that in unison.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that would have been great.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Got a lot less press.

[Josh Clark]

Way less press. It got a lot less money in 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Mm, 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 gonna talk about that now in the form of the Kola borehole, K O L A. And this started in the 1960s? Yes.

[Josh Clark]

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 the American lead. America made the first shot over the Soviet's bow by drilling into the bow first. Yeah, there you go. They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Mohole is a bit of a sciency nerdy joke that plays on the Moho. Discontinuity or discontinuity. How would you say it? The second one Second one, and that is the Moho Discontinuity is the region where the crust and the mantle meet up and say hello.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And they were. I mean, this is theoretical. We should say it's named after a guy named A. I think it's Mohorovichik of Croatia.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Who back in 1909. 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 chuckle later say. And he. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And you know what? Nothing turns me on more than scientifically speaking than early science, where someone got it right. You know what I mean? It's fun to talk about bloodletting and stuff like that, but I love it when somebody, 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.

[Josh Clark]

If bloodletting is wrong, I don't want to be right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Chuck, very nice.

[Josh Clark]

I also want to give a shout out to a group of scientists, the informal drinking group called the American Miscellaneous Society, or amsoc.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they seem fun, huh?

[Josh Clark]

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 got. They. It actually got funding from the National Academy of Sciences, and they started drilling and I guess. What, the Gulf? The Pacific? Oh, God. Is Mexico an island?

[Chuck Bryant]

Your desire for specificity gets you in so much trouble.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, at any rate, I started drilling. Yeah. Wow, that felt really good. I've never tried that before, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Vagary is my secret weapon.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, thanks for letting me in on it. I think I've just turned over a new leaf.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they got that funding. They made it down about just over 600ft, which is not too bad. This to me is one of the more fun facts of the whole episode.

[Josh Clark]

I thought you'd like this.

[Chuck Bryant]

John Steinbeck, the author, went along to document it. Like, who should we get? I don't know. Steinbeck's pretty good.

[Josh Clark]

That's where he got the idea for the end of Mice and Men. There was one of the engineers accidentally dropped a sample, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's good. Wait, was Steinbeck the Pearl?

[Josh Clark]

Is that what his nickname was, the Pearl? No.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, pretty cool.

[Josh Clark]

Nice call, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Awesome project. They pulled the plug in 1966, or I guess rather they stuck in the plug in 1966 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, near the Norwegian border, near the Barents Sea. And this is it. This is the Kola Super Deep borehole. AKA the deepest hole ever dug by human beings.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's like a Kola nut.

[Josh Clark]

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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean you walk right past the thing and not even know it's there.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And the, the reason why you could walk right past is because it's the whole. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's very. 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. I know, but that's the same deal. Like 9 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?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. As we'll see, the Kola super deep borehole got all the way down to 12,262 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you might be disappointed to know if you like took a wrench out there and you're like, I gotta 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 just 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 fold up and kind of caved in in places and is full of gunk.

[Josh Clark]

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 wa as it subsided. The deepest hole in the planet.

[Chuck Bryant]

The saddest of trombones.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so you promised to talk about how deep this thing was. And in true sufficient fashion, we're going to have several examples, none of which are Big Macs. Surprisingly, no.

[Josh Clark]

But there is a Domino's Pizza reference in there.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was hoping not to not mention that.

[Josh Clark]

No, it's that specificity thing I have running through it. I'm just gonna say it. The diameter of the hole is about as big around as a small piece from dominoes there.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. I think people are suspicious of all of our brand mentions, so I was trying to avoid those.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Come on, people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, you know, it's a thing. So this thing is deep, deep, deep. It is about 7.6 miles deep, about 12,262 meters or 40,230ft deep. Like we said, the deepest hole ever. It is lower than. It's deeper than the lowest point of the Mariana Trench. That's a pretty fun one.

[Josh Clark]

Sure 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that's a deep thing, everybody.

[Josh Clark]

Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's one more that knocks my socks off. Can I say it?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's probably the one I scribbled through. So, yes, let's hear it.

[Josh Clark]

It is deeper than the height of the average cruising altitude of a commercial airliner, Specifically Delta Airlines.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. I scratched right through that thing. I was like, we don't need that many examples.

[Josh Clark]

I like that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Yes. And 9.3 miles sounds like a really weird goal, but it turns out that they were going for 15 kilometers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but they thought that was, I guess, out of reach if they figured 9.3 was reasonable.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, and we'll. There was a article I found. It's called Going Deep Excavation Collaboration and Imagination at the Kola 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 Superdeep 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally. That's maybe a good time for a break.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, let's do that.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back, everybody, with more on this deep, deep hole.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The World cup is underway and it's been incredible. On our podcast, the Away End, with Daniel Alarcon and John Green, we're talking about the games that have delighted us, the teams that have inspired us, what we're loving and what surprised us all to the lens of being massive fans of the world's most beautiful game.

[John Green]

Daniel, this tournament has been magical so far. The expanded field of teams has created some incredible matchups that have already made this World cup one to remember, and now things get even more exciting with the intensity of the knockout rounds as the field is whittled down to one World cup champion on July 19.

[Daniel Alarcon]

When you say it like that, I get a pain in my heart that the tournament is over. But there's a lot of soccer yet to go and if the first few games of the round of 32 or any indication anything is possible in the lead up to the final, we've got it covered from an ultra's perspective here on the away end.

[John Green]

So listen to the away end with Daniel Alarcon and John green on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Theo Henderson]

Mainstream media is full of crude depictions of the unhoused stories that shame and blame and paint the Unhoused as a monolith. We the Unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years I've created a space where the Unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBQTIA community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. We Unhouse is a two time Webby and Signal award winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wicheric, a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the Unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to we the unhoused on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Rebecca Nagle]

The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this

[Chuck Bryant]

darker history to it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

I'm Rebecca Nagle Gohin Tawa Don Jalika Yitley Que la Citizen of Cherokee Nation.

[Josh Clark]

Are you guys big Chiefs fans?

[Chuck Bryant]

Hell yeah.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this point. Present Moment Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

So Chuck, we should probably just do a quick primer of 8th grader science, maybe of the layers of the Earth. If you'll bear with me.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

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 got the mantle, and by the way, the ocean. The crust averages about 25 miles or 40 kilometers thick. After that, you 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, you said that's the radius.

[Josh Clark]

That is. No, that's the diameter. The full diameter of the inner core.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

And then possibly there's also a super liquid inner. Inner core that represents the centermost point of Earth.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And that's where Ronnie James Dio resides?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, I think so. I've got to give a obligatory shout out to the greatest tattoo ever.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

Remember that one of Dio on somebody's forearm?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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 Ronny Dio is. The perspective is just that amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The only problem is it involves the armpit. Right. You know?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's really kind of the worst part of the body to me.

[Josh Clark]

The armpit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not a fan to me.

[Josh Clark]

There's other parts that are grosser.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like the butthole.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Unless it's been recently bleached between the toes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, my God. Coming from the guy who just said butthole. Now I'm offended.

[Josh Clark]

I got that from Bruno. Remember the Sacha Baron Cohen movie, Bruno?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You got what?

[Josh Clark]

Anal bleaching.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, is that the first time you'd heard of that?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I hadn't heard of it before.

[Theo Henderson]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 7.6 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it took years and years to do. They started this project on May 24, 1970, and by 1979, they had broken all digging records. By 1989, they had reached that depth of 40,230ft, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The one that. It's like the reverse perspective that gets me is that they dug 0.2% of the entire distance. Distance to the center point of the Earth. So like you said, it's impressive in some terms and other terms, it's just kind of a stupid hole, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I did not even look into that. And I just had great certainty that that was a completely exploitive experience.

[Josh Clark]

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, it's a pretty. Pretty reasonable surmisation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, surmization.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 or, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The place that they were digging. So, like, we usually dig ice cores to kind of get an idea of climate change. That's actually in the fairly recent past. We're talking on the order of tens of hundreds of thousands of years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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 just by boring into it and looking at what comes up. Right. So that's, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. You know, I mentioned promise of earthquake talk. They did. Which has come up a lot lately. Again, but they did learn a lot about that stuff. Like, if you go really deep into these fault lines, you can detect, you know, these tiny minute quakes that you don't even feel up topside where we are. And, you know, all of that is usually about just learning how to get more accurate predictions in the future. You know, they do like computer simulations and stuff, but they need data input to do those simulations.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And these holes give you great data for that kind of thing.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Fun.

[Josh Clark]

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. Like a tamper, like a walk behind tamper, but it has a shotgun shell that you put into it and you shoot. A 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's super cool.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And, you know, we also want to just like pull stuff out of there and see what. What it looks like, what's going on down there. Like, what are you. Deep, deep crust looks like when 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 getting those pictures of what things look like in their sort of undisturbed state is beneficial.

[Josh Clark]

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. Then you'll find just about anywhere.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, don't stifle that people.

[Josh Clark]

No. Get with the program.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. And it's. You know, they didn't realize until they got started. I don't think they thought it was gonna 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 we're 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 the kind of stuff they use to, like, bore subway tunnels and, you know, all kinds of tunnels through mountain. But in this case, they're 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 30ft 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, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the, 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, 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, the denser rock would just push the, 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 lesser known thing about the Kola Superdeep borehole and that is it is not a single straight vertical shaft.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way. Like they just drilled straight down. But when they encountered that really, really tough rock, the drill bit will like get kicked to the side. 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 a la Charlie Brunson in the Great Escape. But the deeper they went, those pipes 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 it looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down. And if they had too much like a drill bit broke off completely or maybe the sides, 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 knock them offline for days at a time.

[Josh Clark]

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 borehole, not bore holes is because there was. There is one central shaft and then the other holes Branch off of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly Right.

[Josh Clark]

So they. The depth that they got to 12, 262 meters. That's the depth. The actual length that they drilled all over the place is. I'm not. I didn't see the actual length, but it seems like it's a lot more than that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

So they. They still. They kind of figured out a workaround for the rock density problem. And then I think at about 10,000ft less than or just over 3,000 meters, they encountered an issue that they. They couldn't. They found they eventually couldn't overcome.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that was temperature. They kind of had guesstimated correctly up into that point what the temperature was about. And you know, what 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.

[Josh Clark]

The heat. My God, the heat.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not even the humidity. The heat.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Although we will find it's possible that it's humid down there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ooh, what a tease.

[Josh Clark]

That's a really great example of how the superdeep borehole, like, rewrote. Science is they mapped it all out. They're like, we're gonna get to 15km because we'll be able to withstand the temperatures until then. And then all of a sudden it got way hotter and way faster. So much so that basically what happened with the pressure and the temperature together turn 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. And it was basically like nailing jello brand gelatin to the wall. That was what they were trying to do at that point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So, I mean, at that point, it was nyet. 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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right, right. I think at its peak, there were, like 700 people who were employed there. And 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. 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 no one, none of the oligarchs, were in any particular mood to keep funding the super deep borehole, especially because it hadn't gotten anywhere in four, three or four years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it was. You know, any stagnant project like that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shudder, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, unfortunately. So.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, maybe we should take a break and we'll talk about what we learned from this super deep borehole.

[Rebecca Nagle]

The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

I'm Rebecca Nagle. Gohin Tawa Don Chalai Kayatli. Que la citizen of Cherokee Nation.

[Josh Clark]

Are you guys big Chiefs fans?

[Chuck Bryant]

Hell, yeah.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Theo Henderson]

Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We the Unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years, I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the lgbqtia community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. We In House is a two time Webby and Signal award winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Gio Witcher, a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to we the Unhoused on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Michael Rapoport]

This is Michael Rapoport and my podcast, the I Am Rappaport Stereo podcast is unlike any one you've ever heard. We're a variety show and if you're looking for strong opinions, funny opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid Jafar Jackson is as good as Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. And it's as good as Timothee Shamalay as Bob Dylan. And I say that with love and respect for both of those actors. And I don't know how many Oscar nominations they give out. I don't know if it's 5, 6 for best actor. 150%. This kid Jafar Jackson should absolutely, positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am rapoport on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I Am Rappaport Podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 were like, that's a great start. And let's move on from here, right?

[Josh Clark]

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, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet you're right. I'd love to hear from our Brit friends about that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I would love to hear that, too.

[Josh Clark]

We have to ask Kyle.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's a great question. You just blew my top.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

It would be quite surprising.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 shouldn't be here. This is crazy. Like, liquid is actually flowing down here. The Soviets, like, released that information, and most of the world at first was like, yeah, right. Like we're going to buy that coming from you.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Josh Clark]

Right. Well, this was full on Soviet union, too, in 1984.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But. But yeah, they were like, how. How would this even happen? Like, explain to us how there's water.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 like kind of filmy gook between the core and then that presses into crystals.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Did you know that you could press water into crystals?

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't know any of this stuff, no.

[Josh Clark]

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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

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 2 billion years. Top that, comrades.

[Chuck Bryant]

Pretty fun. And I bet they were spooky looking like, you know, I saw a garfish the other day when I was paddleboarding 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I reacted with such a start, I went oh my God. That I lost my balance and almost fell off the paddle board, man. And then I had a fear of like, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But just imagine these fossils down there. I mean, these things had to have like teeth. They had to be creepy. Right.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. I didn't see any pictures of them 2 billion years ago.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm not sure I've got a picture in my mind. It looks like an alligator gar.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, that's great. Let's go with that.

[Theo Henderson]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, right, right.

[Josh Clark]

This, these were embedded 2 billion years ago and then carried down through the crust toward the mantle as part of that amazing plate tectonic plate process that keeps the Earth going, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

I wondered if it was if. I think. I'm sure that there are geologists and scientists who are still quite interested in doing that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Why don't they want to. Right, the funding dollars.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Yeah. Because I don't know that there's much, much to be gained from, you know, reaching the mantle. If you're a fossil fuel company, and that's. If you're not getting money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it from fossil fuel companies. They probably, I would estimate, fund 90% of the holes that are being dug around the world right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're like, is there a giant bag of money down there?

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Yeah. They're like, no, no, but not exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, you've lost my ear.

[Josh Clark]

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 thin, thin parts of the oceanic crust.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And that counts.

[Josh Clark]

It definitely counts. Because you're still reaching the mantle.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

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. Of the Kola super deep borehole.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's 1960s level digging.

[Josh Clark]

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 1256 D. They need to step up their naming convention.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think maybe that stands for dominoes.

[Josh Clark]

It probably doesn't. Who sponsored it? The Noid was on board.

[Theo Henderson]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

In the early 2000s, they started digging and I guess the Noid got bored and stopped giving them money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah. How far did they get? Stopped at 1.25km, which is so deep,

[Josh Clark]

so shallow, we're not even gonna bother translating that into miles.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

I couldn't resist.

[Chuck Bryant]

This went so off the rails with the. With the Domino's theme that I really tried to avoid and then embraced.

[Josh Clark]

If you like their marinara, you should try their garlic butter dipping sauce.

[Chuck Bryant]

Man, why don't they sponsor us?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. They really.

[Chuck Bryant]

I wish these were ads, everybody.

[Josh Clark]

I would probably do Domino's ads for free pizza.

[Chuck Bryant]

I am ashamed. Well, not ashamed, I'm proud to say. Maybe. I haven't had a Domino's pizza since probably college.

[Josh Clark]

That's our go to pizza if we get giant chain pizza.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I still love Domino's.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, that is true. There are not as many in Florida. I don't know why, but there's not. But, yes, Atlanta is filthy rich with really good pizza places.

[Chuck Bryant]

I thought you were gonna say that. Like, Yumi and Momo wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get there in 30 minutes.

[John Green]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Or it's free.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm hungry now, Josh. You know that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, no, there's just not that many around here.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, maybe we can take a meeting with sales and turn this into liquid gold.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Can I have your free dominoes? If that's how they pay us. Okay. Sweet.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 five and a half or 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, you know, heat shields and stuff like that.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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 this. 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 Gervin given.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like you said that scientists can't explain the sound that she actually did record. That's not to say, like, that's a supernatural sound. They're just. There's so many processes going on down there, and we so little understand the part of the Earth we can't say what. 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 is not the sounds of hell. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because that's not a real place.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You should go listen to our episode on Hell People. It was a pretty good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know, imagine that there's just sounds like a groan or, you know, something moving around probably makes a sound, right?

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I bet some German musician turned that into a beat or something, right? Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Let's see. I think that's about it. Yeah, that's about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Well, that was the Cola Superdeep 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

In fairness, you can't talk about the Cola Super Deep Porthole without talking about that.

[Josh Clark]

Agreed.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, all right, I'm gonna 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 talk 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. And the joke on the show was that it was, like, kind of exactly the same.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think it was a device to just show like you had to self medicate or else you go crazy from the horror of the whole thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that is Dana Carson from Cleveland who says in a P.S. i've been to Toledo and Tony Pacos many times.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome. Way to go, Dana. Right, Dana?

[Theo Henderson]

Great.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot, Dana. There's actually a Dana Corporation in around Toledo if I'm not mistaken. Maybe it's named after you, Dana. You should go find out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cool.

[Josh Clark]

If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo, say like Libby or Owens or Jeep. We want to hear from from you. You can email [e-mail]

[Rebecca Nagle]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

Guaranteed Human.