US and Soviet Union rivalry to penetrate the earth surface
In the late 1950s, rival US and Soviet scientists teams began planning elaborate tests to penetrate the Earth’s crust. This hardshell, which stretches as far as 30 miles into the center of our planet, finally gives way to the mantle, a mysterious inner layer that accounts for 40% of our planet’s mass. The United States then took the lead in 1958 with the start of Project Mohole. The operation, which took place near Guadalupe, Mexico, saw a team of engineers drill through the Pacific Ocean’s bed to a depth of over 600 feet. However, their funding was cut eight years later, and Project Mohole was abandoned.
Then it was the turn of the Soviets. Researchers began drilling beneath the Pechengsky District, a sparsely populated region on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, on May 24, 1970. Their mission was to travel as deep as possible into the planet’s crust. Furthermore, the Soviets planned to drill to a depth of 49,000 feet below the Earth’s surface. Researchers began digging a sequence of boreholes branching off from a single main hollow with specialized equipment.
On the other hand, Prospectors in America had made some progress while they were slowly making their way down. The Lone Star Producing Company began drilling for oil in Washita County, Oklahoma, in 1974. In the process, the company built the “Bertha Rogers hole,” a man-made wonder that stretches over six miles into the Earth’s surface. Although Lone Star did not find what it was hunting for, its effort resulted in the planet’s deepest hole remaining for another five years. Then, on June 6, 1979, SG-3, one of the Kola boreholes, broke the record. By 1983, the nine-inch-wide hole had sunk 39,000 feet into the Earth’s crust.
