Deep drilling. The deepest well on earth - to hear the Earth's heartbeat

Hundreds of thousands of wells have been drilled in the earth's crust over the last decades of the last century. And this is not surprising, because the search and extraction of minerals in our time is inevitably associated with deep drilling. But among all these wells there is only one on the planet - the legendary Kola Superdeep (SG), the depth of which is still unsurpassed - more than twelve kilometers. In addition, the SG is one of the few that was drilled not for the sake of exploration or mining, but for purely scientific purposes: to study the most ancient rocks of our planet and learn the secrets of the processes going on in them.

Today, no drilling is carried out at the Kola Superdeep, it was stopped in 1992. SG was not the first and not the only one in the program of studying the deep structure of the Earth. Of the foreign wells, three reached depths of 9.1 to 9.6 km. It was planned that one of them (in Germany) would surpass the Kola. However, drilling on all three, as well as on the SG, was stopped due to accidents and for technical reasons cannot be continued yet.

It can be seen that it is not in vain that the tasks of drilling ultra-deep wells are compared in complexity with a flight into space, with a long-term space expedition to another planet. Rock samples extracted from the earth's interior are no less interesting than samples of lunar soil. The soil delivered by the Soviet lunar rover was studied at various institutes, including the Kola Science Center. It turned out that the composition of the lunar soil almost completely corresponds to the rocks extracted from the Kola well from a depth of about 3 km.

SITE SELECTION AND FORECAST

A special exploration expedition (Kola GRE) was created to drill the SG. The place of drilling was also, of course, not chosen by chance - the Baltic Shield in the area of the Kola Peninsula. Here, the oldest igneous rocks with an age of about 3 billion years come to the surface (and the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old). It was interesting to drill in the most ancient igneous rocks, because the sedimentary rocks to a depth of 8 km have already been well studied in oil production. And in igneous rocks during mining, they usually get only 1-2 km. The choice of a place for the SG was also facilitated by the fact that the Pecheneg trough is located here - a huge bowl-like structure, as if pressed into ancient rocks. Its origin is associated with a deep fault. And it is here that large copper-nickel deposits are located. And the tasks assigned to the Kola geological expedition included identifying a number of features of geological processes and phenomena, including ore formation, determining the nature of the boundaries separating layers in the continental crust, and collecting data on the material composition and physical state of rocks.

Prior to drilling, a section of the earth's crust was built on the basis of seismological data. It served as a forecast for the appearance of those earth layers that the well crossed. It was assumed that a granite sequence extends to a depth of 5 km, after which stronger and more ancient basalt rocks were expected.

So, the north-west of the Kola Peninsula, 10 km from the city of Zapolyarny, not far from our border with Norway, was chosen as the drilling site. Zapolyarny is a small town that grew up in the fifties next to a nickel plant. Among the hilly tundra on a hillock blown by all the winds and snowstorms, there is a "square", each side of which is formed from seven five-story houses. Inside there are two streets, at their intersection there is a square where the House of Culture and the hotel stand. A kilometer from the town, behind the ravine, the buildings and tall chimneys of the nickel plant are visible, behind it, along the mountain slope, waste rock dumps from the nearest quarry darken. Near the town there is a highway to the city of Nikel and to a small lake, on the other side of which is already Norway.

The land of those places in abundance keeps traces of the past war. When you travel by bus from Murmansk to Zapolyarny, about half way you cross the small river Zapadnaya Litsa, on its bank there is a memorial obelisk. This is the only place in all of Russia where the front stood motionless during the war from 1941 to 1944, resting against the Barents Sea. Although there were fierce battles all the time and the losses on both sides were huge. The Germans tried unsuccessfully to break through to Murmansk, the only ice-free port in our North. In the winter of 1944, Soviet troops managed to break through the front.

On this hook, a string of pipes was lowered and raised. On the left - in a basket - there are 33-meter pipes prepared for descent - "candles".

Kola superdeep well. In the figure on the right: A. Forecast of the geological section. B. Geological section constructed on the basis of SG drilling data (arrows from column A to column B indicate at what depth the predicted rocks are encountered). In this section, the upper part (up to 7 km) is a Proterozoic sequence with layers of volcanic (diabase) and sedimentary rocks (sandstones, dolomites). Below 7 km there is an Archean stratum with repeating rock units (mainly gneisses and amphibolites). Its age is 2.86 billion years. C. The borehole with many drilled and lost boreholes (below 7 km) is shaped like the branched roots of a giant plant. The well seems to meander, because the drill is constantly deviated towards less durable rocks.

From Zapolyarny to Superdeep - 10 km. The road goes past the plant, then along the edge of the quarry and then climbs uphill. A small basin opens from the pass, in which a drilling rig is installed. Its height is from a twenty-story building. "Shift workers" came here from Zapolyarny to each shift. In total, about 3,000 people worked on the expedition, they lived in the city in two houses. The grumbling of some mechanisms was heard around the clock from the drilling rig. Silence meant that for some reason there was a break in drilling. In winter, during the long polar night - and it lasts there from November 23 to January 23 - the entire drilling rig was lit up with lights. Often, the light of the aurora was added to them.

A little about the staff. A good, highly qualified team of workers gathered in the Kola geological exploration expedition, created for drilling. D. Huberman was almost always the head of the GRE, a talented leader who selected the team. Chief engineer I. Vasilchenko was responsible for drilling. The rig was commanded by A. Batishchev, whom everyone called simply Lekha. V. Laney was in charge of geology, and Yu. Kuznetsov was in charge of geophysics. Huge work on core processing and creation of the core storage was carried out by geologist Yu. Smirnov - the one who had the "cherished locker", which we will tell about later. More than 10 research institutes took part in the research on the SG. The team also had its own "kulibins" and "left-handers" (S. Tserikovsky was especially distinguished), who invented and manufactured various devices, sometimes allowing them to get out of the most difficult, seemingly hopeless situations. They themselves created many of the necessary mechanisms here in well-equipped workshops.

DRILLING HISTORY

Drilling of the well began in 1970. Sinking to a depth of 7263 m took 4 years. It was driven by a serial installation, which is usually used in the extraction of oil and gas. Because of the constant winds and cold, the entire tower had to be sheathed to the top with wooden shields. Otherwise, it is simply impossible for someone who must stand at the top during the lifting of the pipe string to work.

Then there was a one-year break associated with the construction of a new derrick and the installation of a specially designed drilling rig - "Uralmash-15000". It was with her help that all further ultra-deep drilling was carried out. The new installation has more powerful automated equipment. Turbine drilling was used - this is when not the entire string rotates, but only the drill head. Drilling fluid was fed through the column under pressure, which rotated the multi-stage turbine below. Its total length is 46 m. The turbine ends with a drilling head with a diameter of 214 mm (it is often called a crown), which has an annular shape, so an undrilled column of rock remains in the middle - a core with a diameter of 60 mm. A pipe passes through all sections of the turbine - a core receiver, where columns of mined rock are collected. The crushed rock, together with the drilling fluid, is carried along the well to the surface.

On the core samples on the right, oblique stripes are clearly visible, which means that here the well passed through the layers located obliquely.

The mass of the string immersed in the well with drilling fluid is about 200 tons. This despite the fact that specially designed pipes made of light alloys were used. If the column is made of ordinary steel pipes, it will break from its own weight.

There are many difficulties, sometimes completely unexpected, in the process of drilling at great depths and with the selection of cores.

Penetration in one trip, determined by the wear of the drill head, is usually 7-10 m. (A trip, or a cycle, is the descent of a string with a turbine and a drilling tool, the actual drilling and a complete rise of the string.) The drilling itself takes 4 hours. And the descent and ascent of the 12-kilometer column takes 18 hours. When lifting, the string is automatically disassembled into sections (stands) 33 m long. On average, 60 m were drilled per month. 50 km of pipes were used to drill the last 5 km of the well. That's how worn they are.

Up to a depth of about 7 km, the well crossed strong, relatively homogeneous rocks, and therefore the wellbore was flat, almost corresponding to the diameter of the drill head. Work progressed, one might say, calmly. However, at a depth of 7 km, less strong fractured, interbedded with small very hard interlayers of rocks - gneisses, amphibolites - went. Drilling has become more difficult. The trunk took an oval shape, many cavities appeared. Accidents have become more frequent.

The figure shows the initial forecast of the geological section and the one made on the basis of drilling data. It is interesting to note (column B) that the formation inclination along the well is about 50 degrees. Thus, it is clear that the rocks intersected by the well come to the surface. It is here that one can recall the already mentioned "cherished locker" of the geologist Y. Smirnov. There, on one side, he had samples obtained from the well, and on the other, taken on the surface at that distance from the drilling rig, where the corresponding layer goes up. The coincidence of breeds is almost complete.

The year 1983 was marked by a hitherto unsurpassed record: the drilling depth exceeded 12 km. Work has been suspended.

The International Geological Congress was approaching, which, according to the plan, was held in Moscow. The Geoexpo exhibition was being prepared for it. It was decided not only to read the reports on the results achieved at the SG, but also to show the congress participants the work in kind and the extracted rock samples. The monograph "Kola Superdeep" was published for the congress.

At the Geoexpo exhibition, there was a large stand dedicated to the work of the SG and the most important thing - achieving a record depth. There were impressive graphs telling about the technique and technology of drilling, mined rock samples, photographs of equipment and the team at work. But the greatest attention of participants and guests of the congress was attracted by one non-traditional detail for an exhibition show: the most common and already slightly rusted drill head with worn carbide teeth. The label said that it was she who was used when drilling at a depth of more than 12 km. This drill head amazed even specialists. Probably, everyone involuntarily expected to see some kind of miracle of technology, maybe with diamond equipment ... And they still did not know that a large pile of exactly the same already rusted drill heads was assembled on the SG next to the drilling rig: after all, they had to be replaced with new ones for about every 7-8 meters drilled.

Many congress delegates wanted to see with their own eyes the unique drilling rig on the Kola Peninsula and make sure that a record drilling depth had indeed been achieved in the Union. Such a departure took place. There, a meeting of the congress section was held on the spot. The delegates were shown the drilling rig, while they were lifting a string from the well, disconnecting 33-meter sections from it. Photos and articles about the SG were published in newspapers and magazines in almost all countries of the world. A postage stamp was issued, special cancellation of envelopes was organized. I will not list the names of the winners of various awards and those awarded for their work ...

But the holidays were over, we had to continue drilling. And it began with the largest accident on the very first flight on September 27, 1984 - a "black date" in the history of the SG. The well does not forgive when it is left unattended for a long time. During the time until drilling was carried out, changes inevitably occurred in its walls, those that were not fixed with a cemented steel pipe.

At first everything went smoothly. The drillers carried out their usual operations: one by one they lowered the sections of the drill string, to the last, upper one, they connected the drilling fluid supply pipe, turned on the pumps. We started drilling. The instruments on the console in front of the operator showed the normal mode of operation (the number of revolutions of the drill head, its pressure on the rock, the fluid flow rate for the rotation of the turbine, etc.).

Having drilled another 9-meter segment at a depth of more than 12 km, which took 4 hours, they reached a depth of 12.066 km. Prepare for the rise of the column. We tried. Doesn't go. At such depths, "sticking" has been observed more than once. This is when some section of the column seems to stick to the walls (maybe something crumbled from above, and it jammed a little). To move the column from its place, a force exceeding its weight (about 200 tons) is required. So did this time, but the column did not move. We added a little effort, and the arrow of the device sharply slowed down the readings. The column became much lighter, there could not have been such a weight loss during the normal course of the operation. We began to rise: one by one, the sections were unscrewed one after the other. During the last ascent, a shortened piece of pipe with an uneven bottom edge hung on a hook. This meant that not only the turbodrill, but also 5 km of drill pipes remained in the well...

Seven months trying to get them. After all, we lost not just 5 km of pipes, but the results of five years of work.

Then all attempts to return the lost were stopped and they began to drill again from a depth of 7 km. I must say that it is after the seventh kilometer that the geological conditions here are especially difficult for work. The drilling technology of each step is worked out by trial and error. And starting from a depth of about 10 km - even more difficult. Drilling, operation of equipment and equipment are at the limit.

Therefore, accidents here have to be expected at any moment. They are preparing for them. Methods and means of their elimination are thought over in advance. A typical complex accident is a breakage of the drilling assembly along with part of the drill string. The main method of eliminating it is to create a ledge just above the lost part and from this place to drill a new bypass hole. A total of 12 such bypass holes were drilled in the well. Four of them are from 2200 to 5000 m long. The main cost of such accidents is years of lost labor.

Only in the everyday view, a well is a vertical "hole" from the surface of the earth to the bottom. In reality, this is far from the case. Especially if the well is ultra-deep and crosses inclined seams of various densities. Then it seems to meander, because the drill constantly deviates towards less durable rocks. After each measurement, showing that the inclination of the well exceeds the allowable one, it must be tried to "return to its place". To do this, together with the drilling tool, special "deflectors" are lowered, which help to reduce the angle of inclination of the well during drilling. Accidents often occur with the loss of drilling tools and parts of pipes. After that, a new trunk has to be done, as we have already said, stepping aside. So imagine what a well looks like in the ground: something like the roots of a giant plant branched at a depth.

This is the reason for the special duration of the last phase of drilling.

After the largest accident - the "black date" of 1984 - they again approached a depth of 12 km only after 6 years. In 1990, a maximum was reached - 12,262 km. After a few more accidents, we were convinced that we couldn’t get deeper. All the possibilities of modern technology have been exhausted. It seemed as if the Earth no longer wanted to reveal its secrets. Drilling was stopped in 1992.

RESEARCH. OBJECTIVES AND METHODS

One of the very important goals of drilling was to obtain a core column of rock samples along the entire length of the borehole. And this task has been completed. The longest core in the world was marked out like a ruler in meters and placed in the appropriate order in boxes. The box number and sample numbers are indicated at the top. There are almost 900 such boxes in stock.

Now it remains only to study the core, which is really indispensable in determining the structure of the rock, its composition, properties, and age.

But a rock sample raised to the surface has different properties than in the massif. Here, at the top, he is freed from the enormous mechanical stresses that exist at depth. During drilling, it cracked and became saturated with drilling mud. Even if deep conditions are recreated in a special chamber, the parameters measured on the sample still differ from those in the array. And one more small "hack": for every 100 m of a drilled well, 100 m of core are not obtained. On the SG from depths of more than 5 km, the average core recovery was only about 30%, and from depths of more than 9 km, these were sometimes only individual plaques 2-3 cm thick, corresponding to the most durable interlayers.

So, the core taken from the well on the SG does not provide complete information about deep rocks.

The wells were drilled for scientific purposes, so the whole range of modern research methods was used. In addition to extracting the core, studies of the properties of rocks in their natural occurrence were necessarily carried out. The technical condition of the well was constantly monitored. The temperature was measured throughout the wellbore, natural radioactivity - gamma radiation, induced radioactivity after pulsed neutron irradiation, electrical and magnetic properties of rocks, elastic wave propagation velocity, and the composition of gases in the well fluid.

To a depth of 7 km, serial instruments were used. Work at greater depths and at higher temperatures required the creation of special heat and pressure resistant instruments. Particular difficulties arose during the last stage of drilling; when the temperature in the well approached 200°C and the pressure exceeded 1000 atmospheres, the serial instruments could no longer work. The geophysical design bureaus and specialized laboratories of several research institutes came to the rescue, producing single copies of thermal pressure-resistant instruments. Thus, all the time they worked only on domestic equipment.

In a word, the well was investigated in sufficient detail to its entire depth. The studies were carried out in stages, approximately once a year, after deepening the well by 1 km. Each time after that, the reliability of the received materials was assessed. Appropriate calculations made it possible to determine the parameters of a particular breed. We discovered a certain alternation of layers and already knew what rocks the caverns are confined to and the partial loss of information associated with them. We learned to identify rocks literally by "crumbs" and on this basis to recreate a complete picture of what the well "hidden". In short, we managed to build a detailed lithological column - to show the alternation of rocks and their properties.

FROM OWN EXPERIENCE

Approximately once a year, when the next stage of drilling was completed - deepening the well by 1 km, I also went to the SG to take the measurements that I was entrusted with. The well at this time was usually washed out and provided for research for a month. The time of the planned stop was always known in advance. The telegram-call for work also came in advance. The equipment has been checked and packaged. The formalities related to closed work in the border zone have been completed. Finally everything is settled. Let's go.

Our group is a small friendly team: a downhole tool developer, a developer of new ground equipment, and I am a methodologist. We arrive 10 days before measurements. We get acquainted with the data on the technical condition of the well. We draw up and approve a detailed measurement program. We assemble and calibrate equipment. We are waiting for a call - a call from the well. Our turn to "dive" is the third, but if there is a refusal from the predecessors, the well will be provided to us. This time they are all right, they say that tomorrow morning they will finish. We are in the same team of geophysicists - operators who record the signals received from the equipment in the well and command all operations for lowering and raising the downhole tool, as well as mechanics on the lift, they control the winding from the drum and winding on it those same 12 km of cable on which the tool is lowered into the well. Drillers are also on duty.

Work has begun. The device is lowered into the well for several meters. Last check. Go. The descent is slow - about 1 km / h, with continuous monitoring of the signal coming from below. So far so good. But at the eighth kilometer, the signal twitched and disappeared. So something is wrong. Full lift. (Just in case, we have prepared a second set of equipment.) We begin checking all the details. This time the cable was faulty. He is being replaced. This takes more than a day. The new descent took 10 hours. Finally, the observer of the signal said: "Arrived at the eleventh kilometer." Command to operators: "Start recording". What and how is pre-scheduled according to the program. Now you need to lower and raise the downhole tool several times in a given interval in order to take measurements. This time the equipment worked fine. Now full lift. We climbed up to 3 km, and suddenly the call of the winch (he is our man with humor): "The rope is over." How?! What?! Alas, the cable broke... The downhole tool and 8 km of cable were left lying at the bottom... Fortunately, a day later, the drillers managed to pick it all up, using the methodology and devices developed by local craftsmen to eliminate such emergencies.

RESULTS

The tasks set in the ultra-deep drilling project have been fulfilled. Special equipment and technology for ultra-deep drilling, as well as for the study of wells drilled to a great depth, have been developed and created. We received information, one might say, "first-hand" about the physical state, properties and composition of rocks in their natural occurrence and from the core to a depth of 12,262 m.

The well gave out an excellent gift to the motherland at a shallow depth - in the range of 1.6-1.8 km. Industrial copper-nickel ores were discovered there - a new ore horizon was discovered. And very handy, because the local nickel plant is already running out of ore.

As noted above, the geological forecast of the well section did not come true (see the figure on page 39.). The picture that was expected during the first 5 km in the well stretched for 7 km, and then completely unexpected rocks appeared. The basalts predicted at a depth of 7 km were not found, even when they dropped to 12 km.

It was expected that the boundary that gives the most reflection in seismic sounding is the level where the granites pass into a more durable basalt layer. In reality, it turned out that less durable and less dense fractured rocks - Archean gneisses - are located there. This was not expected at all. And this is a fundamentally new geological and geophysical information that allows you to interpret the data of deep geophysical surveys in a different way.

The data on the process of ore formation in the deep layers of the earth's crust also turned out to be unexpected and fundamentally new. So, at depths of 9-12 km, highly porous fractured rocks saturated with underground highly mineralized waters were encountered. These waters are one of the sources of ore formation. Previously, it was believed that this was possible only at much shallower depths. It was in this interval that an increased gold content was found in the core - up to 1 g per 1 ton of rock (a concentration that is considered suitable for industrial development). But will it ever be profitable to mine gold from such a depth?

The ideas about the thermal regime of the earth's interior, about the deep distribution of temperatures in the areas of basalt shields, have also changed. At a depth of more than 6 km, a temperature gradient of 20°C per 1 km was obtained instead of the expected (as in the upper part) 16°C per 1 km. It was revealed that half of the heat flux is of radiogenic origin.

Having drilled the unique Kola super-deep well, we learned a lot and at the same time realized how little we still know about the structure of our planet.

Candidate of Technical Sciences A. OSADCHI.

LITERATURE

Kola superdeep. Moscow: Nedra, 1984.
Kola superdeep. Scientific results and research experiences. M., 1998.
Kozlovsky E. A. World Forum of Geologists. "Science and Life" No. 10, 1984.
Kozlovsky E. A. Kola superdeep. "Science and Life" No. 11, 1985.

Sredao.ru cottage settlements from HABITAT

Sredao.ru townhouses from real estate agency HABITAT

Soil studies prove: the moon broke away from the Kola Peninsula

Kola superdeep in section

Kola Superdeep

Allegedly, on the approach to the 13th kilometer, the instruments recorded a strange noise coming from the bowels of the planet - the yellow newspapers unanimously assured that only the cries of sinners from the underworld could sound like this. A few seconds after the appearance of a terrible sound, an explosion thundered ...

Space under your feet

In the late 70s and early 80s, getting a job at the Kola Superdeep, as the inhabitants of the village of Zapolyarny in the Murmansk region call the well familiarly, was more difficult than getting into the cosmonaut corps. From hundreds of applicants, one or two were chosen. Together with the order for employment, the lucky ones received a separate apartment and a salary equal to double or triple the salary of Moscow professors. There were 16 research laboratories working at the well at the same time, each the size of an average plant. Only the Germans dug the earth with such persistence, but, as the Guinness Book of Records testifies, the deepest German well is almost half as long as ours.

Distant galaxies have been studied by mankind much better than what is under the earth's crust a few kilometers from us. The Kola Superdeep is a kind of telescope into the mysterious inner world of the planet.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been believed that the Earth consists of a crust, a mantle, and a core. At the same time, no one really could tell where one layer ends and the next one begins. Scientists did not even know what, in fact, these layers consist of. Some 40 years ago, they were sure that the layer of granites starts at a depth of 50 meters and continues up to 3 kilometers, and then basalts come. It was expected to meet the mantle at a depth of 15–18 kilometers. In reality, everything turned out to be completely different. And although school textbooks still write that the Earth consists of three layers, scientists from the Kola Superdeep proved that this is not so.

Baltic Shield

Projects for traveling deep into the Earth appeared in the early 60s in several countries at once. They tried to drill wells in those places where the crust should have been thinner - the goal was to reach the mantle. For example, the Americans drilled in the area of the island of Maui, Hawaii, where, according to seismic studies, ancient rocks go under the ocean floor and the mantle is located at a depth of about 5 kilometers under a four-kilometer water column. Alas, not a single ocean drilling rig has penetrated deeper than 3 kilometers. In general, almost all ultra-deep well projects mysteriously ended at a depth of three kilometers. It was at this moment that something strange began to happen to the Boers: either they fell into unexpected super-hot areas, or they seemed to be bitten off by some unprecedented monster. Deeper than 3 kilometers, only 5 wells broke through, 4 of them were Soviet. And only the Kola Superdeep was destined to overcome the mark of 7 kilometers.

Initial domestic projects also involved underwater drilling - in the Caspian Sea or on Baikal. But in 1963, drilling scientist Nikolai Timofeev convinced the State Committee for Science and Technology of the USSR that a well should be created on the continent. Although drilling would take incomparably longer, he believed, the well would be much more valuable from a scientific point of view, because it was in the thickness of the continental plates in prehistoric times that the most significant movements of terrestrial rocks took place. The drilling point was chosen on the Kola Peninsula not by chance. The peninsula is located on the so-called Baltic Shield, which is composed of the most ancient rocks known to mankind.

A multi-kilometer cut of the layers of the Baltic Shield is a clear history of the planet over the past 3 billion years.

Conqueror of the Deep

The appearance of the Kola drilling rig is capable of disappointing the layman. The well does not look like a mine that our imagination draws for us. There are no descents underground, only a drill with a diameter of a little more than 20 centimeters goes into the thickness. An imaginary section of the Kola super-deep well looks like a thin needle that has pierced the earth's thickness. A drill with numerous sensors, located at the end of the needle, is raised and lowered over several days. Faster is impossible: the strongest composite cable can break under its own weight.

What happens in the depths is not known for certain. Ambient temperature, noise and other parameters are transmitted upward with a minute delay. However, drillers say that even such contact with the dungeon can be seriously frightening. The sounds coming from below are indeed like screams and howls. To this we can add a long list of accidents that haunted the Kola superdeep when it reached a depth of 10 kilometers. Twice the drill was taken out melted, although the temperatures from which it can melt are comparable to the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Once the cable seemed to be pulled from below - and cut off. Subsequently, when drilling in the same place, no remnants of the cable were found. What caused these and many other accidents is still a mystery. However, they were not at all the reason for stopping the drilling of the bowels of the Baltic Shield.

12,000 meters of discovery and some hell

“We have the deepest hole in the world - this is how you should use it!” - bitterly exclaims the permanent director of the research and production center "Kola Superdeep" David Huberman. In the first 30 years of the existence of the Kola Superdeep, Soviet and then Russian scientists broke through to a depth of 12,262 meters. But since 1995, drilling has been stopped: there was no one to finance the project. What is allocated within the framework of UNESCO's scientific programs is only enough to maintain the drilling station in working order and study previously extracted rock samples.

Huberman recalls with regret how many scientific discoveries took place at the Kola Superdeep. Literally every meter was a revelation. The well showed that almost all of our previous knowledge about the structure of the earth's crust is incorrect. It turned out that the Earth is not at all like a layer cake. “Up to 4 kilometers, everything went according to theory, and then the doomsday began,” says Huberman. Theorists have promised that the temperature of the Baltic Shield will remain relatively low to a depth of at least 15 kilometers. Accordingly, it will be possible to dig a well up to almost 20 kilometers, just up to the mantle. But already at 5 kilometers, the ambient temperature exceeded 700C, at seven - over 1200C, and at a depth of 12 it was roasting stronger than 2200C - 1000C higher than predicted. The Kola drillers questioned the theory of the layered structure of the earth's crust - at least in the range up to 12,262 meters. We were taught at school: there are young rocks, granites, basalts, a mantle and a core. But the granites turned out to be 3 kilometers lower than expected. Next were the basalts. They weren't found at all. All drilling took place in the granite layer. This is an extremely important discovery, because all our ideas about the origin and distribution of minerals are connected with the theory of the layered structure of the Earth.

Another surprise: life on planet Earth arose, it turns out, 1.5 billion years earlier than expected. At depths where it was believed that there was no organic matter, 14 types of fossilized microorganisms were found - the age of the deep layers exceeded 2.8 billion years. At even greater depths, where there are no longer sedimentary rocks, methane appeared in huge concentrations. This completely and utterly destroyed the theory of the biological origin of hydrocarbons such as oil and gas.

Demons

There were also almost fantastic sensations. When, in the late 70s, the Soviet automatic space station brought 124 grams of lunar soil to Earth, the researchers of the Kola Science Center found that it was like two drops of water similar to samples from a depth of 3 kilometers. And a hypothesis arose: the moon broke away from the Kola Peninsula. Now they are looking for exactly where. By the way, the Americans, who brought half a ton of soil from the moon, did nothing sensible with it. Placed in sealed containers and left for research to future generations.

In the history of the Kola Superdeep, it was not without mysticism. Officially, as already mentioned, the well stopped due to lack of funds. Coincidence or not - but it was in that 1995 that a powerful explosion of an unknown nature was heard in the depths of the mine. The journalists of a Finnish newspaper broke through to the inhabitants of Zapolyarny - and the world was shocked by the story of a demon flying out of the bowels of the planet.

“When I was asked about this mysterious story at UNESCO, I did not know what to answer. On the one hand, it's bullshit. On the other hand, I, as an honest scientist, could not say that I know what exactly happened here. A very strange noise was recorded, then there was an explosion ... A few days later, nothing of the kind was found at the same depth, ”recalls Academician David Huberman.

Quite unexpectedly for everyone, the predictions of Alexei Tolstoy from the novel "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" were confirmed. At a depth of over 9.5 kilometers, they discovered a real storehouse of all kinds of minerals, in particular gold. A real olivine layer, brilliantly predicted by the writer. Gold in it is 78 grams per ton. By the way, industrial production is possible at a concentration of 34 grams per ton. Perhaps in the near future humanity will be able to take advantage of this wealth.

The world's deepest well (the Kola super-deep well) was not created at all to find oil.

This borehole is only 23 centimeters wide, but 12,226 meters deep, making its base the deepest point on Earth that man has ever reached. And it appeared thanks to a duel between scientists. American and Soviet researchers tried to outdo each other in everything.

Everyone knows the space race: the Soviet Union was the first to send a man into space, but the Americans were the first to land on the moon.

But few people know that there was a similar race in the underground space: in 1958, the Americans founded their “Project Mohole” off the Pacific coast of Mexico, which they stopped funding and closed in 1966, but the Russians drilled from 1970 to the beginning of 1990- x years.

The result was the Kola super-deep well, which is a system of several wells extending from the main hole. The deepest well is called SG-3, and it runs an impressive path inside the crust of the Kola Peninsula.

If it's hard for you to imagine how deep this well is, that's okay. We can say that it is almost 38 Eiffel Towers in depth. Well, or it has the same length as a chain of 13,000 adult badgers, going head to tail.

As expected, thanks to the SG-3, a lot of unique geological data was obtained, but what paleontologists found there took everyone by surprise. The Smithsonian Institution says that, despite the rather extreme environmental conditions, almost 2 billion years old plankton fossils were found almost intact at a depth of about 6.5 kilometers.

It was also found that most of the seismic data - at the depth where granite turns into basalt - was misunderstood by scientists, and what was previously taken as an unknown geological layer are just slow changes in temperature and density.

Our scientists also have free-flowing water there, which, due to the enormous pressure, was squeezed out of the stones.

Such drilling projects (like the Mohole project and a few more recent ones) are most often abandoned due to lack of funding. Work on the Kola well stopped when it turned out that the temperature at such a depth was about 180⁰С, and not 100 degrees, as expected.

In general, drilling more than 12 kilometers seems like an incredible technical feat, and it is, but this entire hole is nothing more than a small prick of the Earth's surface. The equatorial radius of the Earth is 6378 kilometers, and such an impressive well has covered only 0.19 percent of the way to the center of the planet.

So can a person go even deeper? Is it ever possible to reach the red-hot mantle? It depends on where you will be drilling.

The thickness of the oceanic crust, on average, is about 7 kilometers. The continental crust is somewhat less dense, but much thicker - on average, about 35 kilometers. At such depths, the temperature and pressure are too high for any mechanism, so why not drill in the ocean?

And such attempts are being made. For example, a group of scientists is trying to drill a relatively cold section of the earth's crust on the Atlantic Spit in the Indian Ocean.

The fact that this area is very dense and under water presents significant challenges for engineers, so the project has been put on hold for the past few years. But that still won't stop scientists from trying to get to the pristine, slowly bubbling inner mantle.

Today, no drilling is carried out at the Kola Superdeep, it was stopped in 1992. SG was not the first and not the only one in the program of studying the deep structure of the Earth.

Of the foreign wells, three reached depths of 9.1 to 9.6 km. It was planned that one of them (in Germany) would surpass the Kola. However, drilling on all three, as well as on the SG, was stopped due to accidents and for technical reasons cannot be continued yet.

The soil delivered by the Soviet lunar rover was studied at various institutes, including the Kola Science Center. It turned out that the composition of the lunar soil almost completely corresponds to the rocks extracted from the Kola well from a depth of about 3 km.

The well showed that almost all of our previous knowledge about the structure of the earth's crust is incorrect. It turned out that the Earth is not at all like a layer cake. “Up to 4 kilometers, everything went according to theory, and then the doomsday began,” says Huberman.

Theorists have promised that the temperature of the Baltic Shield will remain relatively low to a depth of at least 15 kilometers. Accordingly, it will be possible to dig a well up to almost 20 kilometers, just up to the mantle.

But already at 5 kilometers, the ambient temperature exceeded 70 degrees Celsius, at seven - over 120 degrees, and at a depth of 12 it was roasting more than 220 degrees - 100 degrees higher than predicted. The Kola drillers questioned the theory of the layered structure of the earth's crust - at least in the range up to 12,262 meters.

We were taught at school: there are young rocks, granites, basalts, a mantle and a core. But the granites turned out to be 3 kilometers lower than expected. Next were the basalts. They weren't found at all. All drilling took place in the granite layer. This is an extremely important discovery, because all our ideas about the origin and distribution of minerals are connected with the theory of the layered structure of the Earth.

As noted above, the geological forecast of the well section did not come true. The picture that was expected during the first 5 km in the well stretched for 7 km, and then completely unexpected rocks appeared. The basalts predicted at a depth of 7 km were not found, even when they dropped to 12 km.

It was in this interval that an increased gold content was found in the core - up to 1 g per 1 ton of rock (a concentration that is considered suitable for industrial development). But will it ever be profitable to mine gold from such a depth?

Having drilled the unique Kola super-deep well, we learned a lot and at the same time realized how little we still know about the structure of our planet.

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In the 50-70s of the last century, the world was changing at an incredible speed. Things have appeared, without which it is difficult to imagine today's world: the Internet, a computer, cellular communications, the conquest of space and the depths of the sea appeared. Man was rapidly expanding the spheres of his presence in the Universe, but he still had rather rough ideas about the structure of his "home" - the planet Earth. Although even then the idea of ultra-deep drilling was not new: back in 1958, the Americans launched a project Mohole. Its name is derived from two words:

Moho a surface named after Andriy Mohorovichich- Croatian geophysicist and seismologist, who in 1909 singled out the lower boundary of the earth's crust, on which there is an abrupt increase in the speed of seismic waves;
hole- well, hole, orifice. Based on the assumption that the thickness of the earth's crust under the oceans is much less than on land, 5 wells were drilled near the island of Guadelupe with a depth of about 180 meters (with an ocean depth of up to 3.5 km). In five years, the researchers drilled five wells, collected many samples from the basalt layer, but did not reach the mantle. As a result, the project was declared a failure and the work was curtailed.

Vessel CUSS, which carried out the Mohole project

One of the main goals of the expedition "On the roads of the Arctic" was the Kola super-deep well (or object SG-3) - the deepest in the world. I first learned about it back in 2004, when I was a first-year student at the Geological Faculty of the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, at a lecture on general geology. And since then I hoped to see everything with my own eyes.

Times have changed and, once hard-to-reach, the territory of the SG-3 facility is now in close proximity to the mining and processing plant of the Kola Mining and Metallurgical Company. And the passage to the well goes through technological roads.

If you go by the navigator, then after the city of Zapolyarny it will lead to the checkpoint of the mining and processing plant. The guards, of course, will not let you into the territory, but allegedly I have not heard anything about the Kola Superdeep.

The management of the plant was expectedly tired of the constant pilgrimage to the Kola super-deep all sorts of neo-stalkers, geology lovers and metal hunters, so they dug up the road to the well with excavators and, to be sure, sprinkled with cobblestones.

Therefore, we return to the place where the mobile Internet worked for the last time and look for a well-trimmed alternative road via satellite. Having found the cherished lapel, we raise the hydropneumatic suspension of our Toyota Land Cruiser 200 Executive to the top position, and crawl along the hills towards the well.

The road, as befits a real adventure, abounded with all sorts of obstacles - fords, stones, even lakes.

Having already returned to Murmansk and analyzing the gps track (we wrote the entire route using the locme.ru service, I will talk about it later), I noticed that we were not going to the well by the optimal route and somewhere lost our way, but back passed as it should. What, I don't regret it one bit.

The track was recorded using the LocMe service.

And now, having climbed another hill, we have a view of the once majestic research and production complex of the Kola Superdeep Well.

In an effort to take a leading position in all industries at once, in 1962 the USSR launched its ultra-deep drilling program.

It took 4 years to prepare the project: the main difficulty was that according to the geothermal gradient (a physical quantity describing the increase in the temperature of rocks with depth), the temperature at a depth of 10 km should be about 300 ° C, and at 15 km - almost 500 ° WITH. Neither the drilling tool nor the measuring equipment was designed for such a temperature. By 1970, just in time for the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth, a drilling site was found - an ancient crystalline shield of the Kola Peninsula. According to a report by the Institute of Physics of the Earth, the Kola Shield has cooled over billions of years, the temperature at a depth of 15 km should not have exceeded 150°C. According to an approximate section, the first 7 kilometers should be composed of granite strata of the upper part of the earth's crust, and basalts begin below. The drilling site was chosen on the northern tip of the Kola Peninsula near Lake Vilgiskoddeoaivinjärvi (in Finnish it means “Under the Wolf Mountain”). Drilling of the well, the design depth of which was 15 kilometers, began in May 1970.

Despite the non-trivial task, no special equipment was developed for the work - they worked with what they had. At the first stages, the Uralmash 4E drilling rig with a lifting capacity of 200 tons and light-alloy aluminum pipes were used. Expensive aluminum was used for a number of reasons: pipes made of "winged metal" have much less weight, and at temperatures above 150-160 degrees, the steel of serial pipes softens and holds multi-ton loads worse - because of this, the likelihood of dangerous deformations and breakage of the column increases. When the well reached depth 7000 meters, a new drilling rig was installed on the site "Uralmash 15000"- one of the most modern at that time. Powerful, reliable, with an automatic tripping mechanism, it could withstand a pipe string up to 15 km long. The drilling rig has turned into a fully sheathed tower 68 m high, recalcitrant to the strong winds raging in the Arctic. The weight of the drill string alone at 15 km depth would reach 200 tons. And the installation itself could lift loads up to 400 tons. A repair and mechanical plant, scientific laboratories and a core store have grown nearby. : in the 70s, rotary drilling was the most widespread, when the entire pipe string was turned by a rotor located on the surface. This method was excellent for relatively shallow wells, but when the length of the trunk approaches 7,000 or even 10,000 meters, rotary drilling becomes powerless. At SG-3, drilling was carried out using a turbodrill - a hydraulic engine, the rotation of which was provided by the energy of the circulating drilling fluid. Installed at the lower end of the string, 46 meter sections rotated the drill bit. Neither in the USSR, nor in the world at that time there was no experience of drilling in the rocks of the crystalline basement at such depths, and in addition to purely technological problems, the work was complicated by 100% core sampling. Penetration in one trip, determined by the wear of the drill head, is usually 7-10 m the rise of the 12-kilometer column takes about 18 hours. When lifting, the string is automatically disassembled into sections (stands) 33 m long. On average, 60 m were drilled per month. 50 km of pipes were used to drill the last 5 km of the well. That's how worn they are.

Approaching the territory of SG-3, we saw the "Loaf" and people fussily folding pieces of iron inside. This picture has long become familiar to the once advanced scientific center - it was assumed that the Kola super-deep well, after completion of its drilling, would be turned into a unique natural laboratory for studying deep processes occurring in the earth's crust with the help of special instruments. However, in 2008 the facility was finally abandoned, and all more or less valuable equipment was dismantled. From that moment on, a period of plundering of everything that was of at least some value began - primarily metal.

The metal thieves, however, turned out to be quite sociable guys, they were sincerely surprised why we had come here from Moscow - “there was nothing left right there!” and showed the legendary well. Now it is mothballed, and its mouth is covered with a steel plate. What happens in the trunk itself - no one knows.

On the basis of SG-3, in addition to the drilling site itself, several research institutes, their own design bureau, a turning shop, and a forge worked. The most daring technical solutions were born right on the site, implemented on their own, and after a few days they were already tested in work. All this required energy and the Kola Superdeep was served by its own substation. Now the power unit looks like this, once 48 people worked here.

Crates with unique equipment are piled at the entrance. Everything valuable is torn out “with meat”:

A little further away are the pylons of the power lines. All wires, of course, have long been cut off.

According to the directive “from above”, only domestic equipment was used at SG-3, and it could not be otherwise: at first, the well was a top-secret sensitive facility. To a depth of 7 km, serial instruments were used. Work at greater depths and at higher temperatures required the creation of special heat and pressure resistant instruments. Particular difficulties arose during the last stage of drilling; when the temperature in the well approached 200 ° C, and the pressure exceeded 1000 atmospheres, serial devices could no longer work. The geophysical design bureaus and specialized laboratories of several research institutes came to the rescue, producing single copies of thermal pressure-resistant equipment. The competition for employment amounted to dozens of people per place, and those who passed a rigorous selection were immediately given an apartment. At a time when an ordinary Soviet engineer received 120 rubles a month, an engineer at the Kola Superdeep was earning an incredible 850 rubles - three salaries and you can buy a car. In total, about 300 people worked at the Kola Superdeep.

The depth of 7000 meters turned out to be fatal for the Kola super-deep

Depth in 7000 meters turned out to be fatal for the Kola super-deep. Higher up the section, drilling proceeded relatively calmly, the drill passed through homogeneous strong granites. But after this depth, the drill head entered the less durable layered rocks, and the barrel could not be kept vertical. When the well passed the 12 km mark for the first time, the wellbore deviated 21° from the vertical. Although the drillers had already learned to work with the incredible curvature of the trunk, it was impossible to go any further. The well had to be re-drilled from the mark of 7 kilometers. To get a vertical hole in hard formations, you need a very rigid bottom of the drill string so that it enters the bowels like a knife through butter. But another problem arises - the well is gradually expanding, the drill dangles in it, as in a glass, the walls of the barrel begin to collapse and can crush the tool. The solution to this problem turned out to be original - the pendulum technology was applied. The drill was artificially swung in the well and suppressed strong vibrations. Due to this, the trunk turned out vertical. June 6, 1979 the first historical event happened. Drillers reported on reaching the mark in 9584 meters. The Kola well became the deepest well in the world, surpassing the American oil record holder "Bertha Rogers" (9583 meters).

On June 6, 1979, the drilling foreman Fedor Atarshchikov made a triumphant entry in the logbook: “Full face - 9584 meters. Bertha Rogers, chao, goodbye.

Early 1980s There was also a second historical event. Kola Superdeep Passed 11,022 meters bypassing the Mariana Trench. At such a depth inside its own cradle, mankind has not yet fallen. One of the most common drilling accidents is a sticking of the drilling tool, a situation where crumbling walls of the well block the string and do not allow the tool to rotate. Often, attempts to pull out a stuck column end in its breakage. It is useless to look for a tool in a 10-kilometer well, they threw such a hole and started a new one, a little higher. Breakage and loss of pipes on SG-3 happened many times. As a result, in its lower part, the well looks like the root system of a giant plant. The branching of the well upset the drillers, but turned out to be happiness for geologists, who unexpectedly received a three-dimensional picture of an impressive segment of ancient Archean rocks that formed more than 2.5 billion years ago.

Walking through the deserted corridors of the complex, despite the general monstrous devastation, you feel the former greatness of what happened here. In one of the offices, the floor is littered with rare scientific literature - issues of the Defectoscopy magazine for several years and a manual for calculating drill strings for ultra-deep wells - the uniqueness of scientific work is approximately comparable to the "instruction for flying to the moon for dummies", if it existed.

In the other, there is a miraculously preserved workplace of a drilling foreman. The first well in Russia was drilled in 1864 in the Kuban. Since then and until now - the master almost always works directly at the drilling site - to see and control everything that happens. But it was not so on the Kola Superdeep! The operator was sitting as far as 250 meters from the mouth and watched everything remotely, including drilling parameters. Space!

The walls are shabby, the windows are shattered by the harsh north wind, but it does not leave the feeling that a laboratory assistant is about to enter the office and kick out uninvited guests.

V September 1984 depth was first reached in 12,066 meters, and then another break in the drill string happened. This was a real tragedy for the drilling crew, because they had to start all over again, all from the same 7 kilometers, again and again passing through cracks and caverns in the lower layer of the earth's crust. At the same time, within the framework of the World Geological Congress, the work carried out in the Arctic was declassified. In the scientific world, the SG-3 well made a splash. A large delegation of geologists and journalists went to the village of Zapolyarny. Visitors were shown the drilling rig in action, and 33-meter pipe sections were taken out and disconnected. Around were dozens of exactly the same drill bits as the one on the stand in Moscow. The USSR confirmed the status of an advanced power in the field of deep drilling.

V June 1990 when SG-3 reached depth 12,262 m, preparatory work began for sinking up to 14 km, an accident occurred again. At the level of 8550 m, the pipe string broke. The continuation of the work required a long and expensive update of the techniques, so in 1994 drilling of the Kola super-deep was stopped. All the possibilities of modern technology have been exhausted. After 3 years, she got into the Guinness Book of Records and still remains unsurpassed.

What did ultra-deep drilling on the Kola Peninsula give to mankind?

First of all, she refuted the simple two-layer structure of the Earth. Compiled on the basis of the SG-3 core, the geological section turned out to be exactly the opposite of what scientists had previously imagined. The first 7 kilometers were composed of volcanic and sedimentary rocks: tuffs, basalts, breccias, sandstones, dolomites. Deeper lay the so-called Conrad section, after which the velocity of seismic waves in the rocks increased sharply, which was interpreted as the boundary between granites and basalts. This section was passed long ago, but the basalts of the lower layer of the earth's crust did not appear anywhere. On the contrary, granites and gneisses began.
One of the most important goals of drilling was to obtain a core (cylindrical column of rock) for the entire length of the well. The longest core in the world was marked out like a ruler in meters and placed in the appropriate order in boxes. The box number and sample numbers are indicated at the top. There are almost 900 such boxes in stock.

Seismic sections in the bowels, as it turned out, are not the boundaries of layers of rocks of different composition. Rather, they indicate a change in the petrophysical properties of rocks with depth. At high pressure and temperature, the properties change so much that granites become similar to basalts in their physical characteristics, and vice versa. It was believed that with depth and increasing pressure, the porosity and fracturing of rocks decrease. However, starting from the 9 km mark, the strata turned out to be anomalously porous and fractured. Aqueous solutions circulated through a dense system of cracks. Later, this fact was confirmed by other ultra-deep wells on the continents. At depth it turned out to be much hotter than expected: by as much as 80 °! At the mark of 7 km the temperature in the face was 120°C, at 12 km it reached 230°C. In the samples of the Kola well, scientists discovered gold mineralization. Inclusions of the precious metal were found in ancient rocks at a depth of 9.5-10.5 km. However, the concentration of gold was too low to declare a deposit - an average of 37.7 mg per ton of rock, but sufficient to expect it in other similar places. The Kola superdeep well aged the Earth by as much as 1.5 billion years: life appeared on the planet earlier than expected. At depths where it was believed that there was no organic matter, more than 17 types of fossilized microorganisms, microfossils, were found, and in fact the age of these deep layers exceeded 2.8 billion years. And more than a dozen narrowly targeted discoveries.

In total, about 30 ultra-deep wells were drilled in the USSR

Few people know, but more than 30 ultra-deep wells were drilled in the territory of the former USSR (today, all or almost all of them have been destroyed). By special transects (measurement lines) they were connected to each other, obtaining regional geological profiles many thousands of kilometers long. Along the transect, special geophysical equipment was placed, which recorded all the processes occurring in the bowels in a single time. Until 1991, underground nuclear explosions were used as sources of excitation (an impulse that was recorded in wells).

This fundamentally new technical and methodological approach to solving the regional deep structure of the Earth's crust and upper mantle was based on the integration of data from ultra-deep and deep drilling, as well as seismic deep sounding and other geophysical and geochemical methods. For the territory of the USSR, a system was developed for the mutual linking of geophysical profile data based on superdeep reference wells. All this made it possible to carry out a fairly detailed zoning, primarily of promising zones in terms of oil, gas and ore content, throughout the country.

The price of restoration is 100 million rubles?

In his interviews, the director of the Geological Institute of the Kola Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that for 100 million rubles it is possible even now to restore the complex of the Kola superdeep well, open a scientific and technical center on its basis and train specialists in offshore drilling. It is quite clear to me that this is not the case. And the question, unfortunately, is not about money. A unique object comparable in scale and significance to humanity only with a manned flight into space has been lost. And lost forever.

After SG-3, many attempts have been made and are being made in the world to look into the deep horizons of the bowels of the Earth, but unfortunately, not a single project has come close in importance to the work carried out in the Arctic.

- What is the most important thing shown by the Kola well?
- Lord! Most importantly, she showed that we know nothing about the continental crust

How to get to the Kola Superdeep Well? Points, coordinates, etc.

From Murmansk by road A138 we are moving towards the city of Nikel;
At the point 69.479533, 31.824395 there will be a checkpoint where documents will be checked;
We go further to 69.440422, 30.594060 where we turn left;
We continue to move along the technological road to 69.416088, 30.684387 ;
The backfilled road should be on the right hand at the point 69.408826, 30.661051 ;
We go further and carefully look at the lapel on the left hand. I went here: 69.414850, 30.613894 ;
Then we move along the knurled path, but at the point 69.411232, 30.608956 you need to keep to the right.
The coordinates of the well itself 69.396326, 30.609513 .

In the USSR, they loved the scale, but more, and this applied to literally everything. So one well was dug in the Union, which today bears the title of the deepest on earth. It is noteworthy that the well was not drilled for oil production or geological exploration, but purely for scientific research.

Tips used to drill a well.

The Kola super-deep well, or SG-3, is the deepest man-made well in the earth. It is located in the Murmansk region, 10 kilometers from the city of Zapolyarny, in a western direction. The depth of the hole is 12,262 meters. Its diameter at the top is 92 centimeters. At the bottom - 21.5 centimeters. An important feature of the SG-3 is that, unlike any other wells for oil production or geological work, this one was drilled exclusively for scientific purposes.

The well was laid in 1970, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin. The chosen location is remarkable in that the well was drilled in outcropping volcanic rocks more than 3 billion years old. By the way, the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. When mining, wells are rarely drilled deeper than two thousand meters.

The work went on for days on end.

Drilling began on May 24, 1970. Up to the mark of 7,000 meters, drilling proceeded easily and calmly, but after the head hit the less dense rocks, problems began. The process has slowed down significantly. Only on June 6, 1979 a new record was set - 9583 meters. It was previously installed in the US by oil producers. The mark of 12,066 meters was passed in 1983. The result was achieved by the International Geological Congress, which was held in Moscow. Subsequently, two accidents occurred at the complex.

Now the complex looks like this.

In 1997, several legends were circulated in the media at once that the Kola super-deep well was the real road to hell. One of these legends said that when the team lowered the microphone to a depth of several thousand meters, human screams, groans and screams were heard there.

Of course, there was nothing of the kind. If only because special equipment is used to record sound in a well at such a depth - but it did not record anything either. There were indeed several accidents at the complex, including an underground explosion during drilling, but geologists definitely did not disturb any underground “demons”.

The well itself is mothballed.

It is really important that 16 research laboratories worked at SG-3. During the Soviet Union, domestic geologists were able to make many valuable discoveries and better understand how our planet works. The work at the site allowed to significantly improve the drilling technology. The scientists were also able to understand the local geological processes, received comprehensive data on the thermal regime of the bowels, underground gases and deep waters.

Unfortunately, today the Kola super-deep well is closed. The building of the complex has been deteriorating since the last laboratory was closed here in 2008, and all equipment was dismantled. The reason is simple - lack of funding. In 2010, the well was already mothballed. Now it is slowly but surely destroyed under the influence of natural processes.