Kolskaya Superdeep Borehole
[Historical / Description data]
The Kola (Kolskaya) Superdeep Borehole SG-3 (Russian: Кольская сверхглубокая скважина СГ-3, romanized: Kol’skaya sverkhglubokaya skvazhina SG-3) is the deepest human-made hole on Earth (since 1979), which attained maximum true vertical depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 ft; 7.619 mi) in 1989. It is the result of a scientific drilling effort to penetrate as deeply as possible into the Earth’s crust conducted by the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District Kola Peninsula, near the Russian border with Norway.
SG (СГ) is a Russian designation for a set of superdeep (Russian: сверхглубокая) boreholes conceived as part of a Soviet scientific research programme of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Aralsor SG-1 (in the Pre-Caspian Basin of west Kazakhstan) and Biyikzhal SG-2 (in Krasnodar Krai), both less than 6,810 metres (22,340 ft) deep, preceded Kola SG-3, which was originally intended to reach 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) deep. Drilling at Kola SG-3 began in 1970 using the Uralmash-4E, and later the Uralmash-15000 series drilling rig. A total of five 23-centimetre-diameter (9 in) boreholes were drilled, two branching from a central shaft and two from one of those branches.
In addition to being the deepest human-made hole on Earth, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 was, for almost three decades, the world’s longest borehole in measured depth along its bore, until surpassed in 2008 by a hydrocarbon extraction borehole at the Al Shaheen Oil Field in Qatar.
[Legend data]
The Kola superdeep borehole served as the source of the urban legend of the "well to hell", according to which the borehole sensors recorded the sounds of hell. This urban legend has been spread on the Internet since at least 1997. For the first time in English, it was announced in 1989 on the air of the American television company Trinity Broadcasting Network, which took the story from a Finnish newspaper report published on April Fool’s Day.
This legend is fiction, because acoustic methods of well research use seismic receivers in the form of a probe with a generator and a receiver of vibrations, which record not sound, but a wave pattern of reflected elastic vibrations excited by a radiator with a frequency of 10-20 kHz and 20 kHz-2 MHz, and transmit the signal reflected from the stratum in the form of an electric pulse. on the TV. The published "audio recording" of these sounds is the processing of an electric pulse.
Ignorance has given rise to many other legends around the Kola superdeep borehole. One of the earliest was in circulation in the USSR back in the mid-1980s (it appeared at least no later than May 1987); it was about a demonic creature that got out of the ground through a drilling pipe.
At the same time, in 1995, an explosion actually occurred in the depth of the well, the cause of which was never established. The head of the drilling operations, Academician D. M. Guberman, said: "When people ask me about this mysterious story, I do not know what to answer. On the one hand, the stories about the "demon" are idiotism. On the other hand, as an honest scientist, I cannot say that I know exactly what happened here. Indeed, a very strange noise was recorded, then there was an explosion.… A few days later, nothing like this was found at the same depth".
