The Deepest Hole Dug By Humans
And down and down and down and down it goes
On May 24th, 1970, a massive drill made by the Russian company Uralmash spun up for the first time. A small group of workers, scientists, and engineers watched as the drill began to penetrate the frozen ground. The team had set up shop in the frigid northern regions of the Kola Peninsula. Their mission was to dig a hole through the Earth’s crust and into the mantel.
Like many of the most ambitious feats in human history, this one started in the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists wanted to see how deep they could dig with a single boring drill. The project began in 1970 and continued digging through 1992. It turns out that digging the world’s deepest hole takes a lot of time and money.
This was not a quick process.
The Deepest Depths
The hole became known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole and it broke the world record for the deepest hole in the world in 1979. It took nine years for the Soviet drilling efforts to surpass the necessary depth of 31,440 ft to claim the record for themselves.
