1/26/2024 0 Comments Art text earth![]() “Some people thought it did sound like hell. 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, a rumbling that made her “feel very small it was the first time in my life this big ball we live on came to life, and it sounds haunting,” she says. The site has become in effect an observatory of the planet – or even an art gallery. The huge drill rig is still there – and a tourist attraction today – but today the crane just lowers instruments for measurement. The German borehole has been spared the fate of the others. Now the desolate site is a destination for adventurous tourists. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union there was no money to fund such projects – and three years later the whole facility was closed down. This was twice what was expected at that depth and drilling deeper was no longer possible. ![]() Drilling was stopped in 1992, when the temperature reached 180C (356F). Then it was the turn of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. “In places like Oman you can find mantle close to the surface, but that’s mantle as it was millions of years ago. “The ultimate goal of the project is to get actual living samples of the mantle as it exists right now,” says Sean Toczko, programme manager for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science. There used to be common understanding among Western scientists that the crust was so dense 5km down that water could not permeate through it.” “When the Russians started to drill they claimed they had found free water – and that was simply not believed by most scientists. One of the main motivations was that the Russians were simply not really open with their data. “And there was certainly competition between us. “It was in the time of the Iron Curtain when the drilling was started,” says Uli Harms of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, who as a young scientist worked on the German rival to the Kola borehole.
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