In the middle of the Cold War, a project was born in response to the mythical space race. While the United States and the USSR competed to see who could reach the Moon first, the Soviets tried to demonstrate their technological prowess in other areas.
The clear example was the Kola well SG-3 whose project and first studies began in 1970 and ended in 1989. The well reached a maximum depth of 12,262 meters.
The story of the deepest well on Earth
The initial objective was to reach a depth of 15,000 meters.to study the Mohorovicic discontinuity, the technical name given to the boundary between the crust and the Earth’s command.
The excavation began in 1979 and during drilling the scientists discovered great unexpected materials such as liquid water at depths where it was not thought possible, fossils of marine organisms more than two billion years old and the sound of tectonic plates was also detected (which later became urban legends as screams from hell)
For almost two decades, workers excavated tirelessly, finding metals, deposits of copper, nickel and magnetite and even rocks very similar to lunar samples existing.
The end of the excavation arose because the models of the time They predicted a temperature of about 100º C at the bottom of the well. However, the instruments registered a notable difference reaching the 180ºC a key difference when continuing with the project.
By continuing to dig, the heat reached a temperature of 212ºC which makes the rock stop being solid and due to the pressure and extreme temperatures it becomes something similar to plastic, with a viscous texture, something similar to thick honey.
This meant that as they advanced the hole was welding itself making it impossible for the drills to continue drilling. Neither the hardness of the rock nor the budget allowed the excavation to continue, so the project was definitively terminated.
Despite the failure after not reaching its final objective, this well has transcended historically and as a research instrument because allowed us to advance the future of geothermal energy.
Far from being a simple historical curiosity, the data accumulated in the project is finding a second life. One example of these is research into enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, a technology that involves drilling deeply into hot rock and injecting water under high pressure into the hot rock to generate electricity.