The world's deepest man made hole stretches to about 40,000 feet below the surface and it's covered by a rusty metal lid. It is 23 centimetres in diameter and many people refer to it as the entrance to hell.
This hole is none other than the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth and if you were to fall down the hole, it would take you around 3.5 to 4 minutes to reach the bottom.
The project to drill into the Earth's surface began near Murmansk in the 1970s, when Soviet scientists wanted to learn more about the Earth's crust. It took the Soviets almost 20 years to drill this far, but they only managed to drill about one-third of the way through the crust to the Earth’s mantle when the project came grinding to a halt in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.
They had already managed to dig more than 12 kilometers down into the Earth before they were forced to stop in 1992 because the temperature was too high. It was around 180 degrees Celsius, which was far hotter than the scientists predicted it would be.
Experts still need to figure out a way to overcome this temperature issue if they want to keep drilling and not destroy all of their equipment in the process.
When the geologists had drilled about 14.4 kilometers deep the drill bit suddenly began to rotate wildly. When Dutch artist Lotte Geevan lowered her microphone protected by a thermal shield down the German borehole it picked up a deep rumbling sound that scientists couldn’t explain.
The sounds are likened to thousands, perhaps millions, of suffering souls screaming. Infact it's so deep that locals swear you can hear the screams of souls tortured in hell, hence its nickname being 'the well to hell'.
Lots of countries wanted to be the first to drill into the Earth's mantle during the Cold War and today Japan is attempting to set this record.
All this drilling wasn't for nothing though as some scientific discoveries were made. The researchers found out that there is water at 12 kilometres into Earth's crust, despite this previously being thought to be impossible.
They also found 24 new types of long dead single celled organisms and gained access to rocks that were 2.7billion years old.
Content created and supplied by: Morbid_Tales (via Opera News )