The deepest well has gone back three billion years

Why are drilling wells today? The closest and most familiar example: to ensure water supply. As a rule, such a water well is shallow, and it is stopped growing as soon as the aquifer is reached. Another example that everyone has on hearing: wells for the production of hydrocarbons, an integral part of oil and gas fields. The fact that you can drill the earth's crust for many kilometers for the sake of science, and not "black gold," is almost never remembered.

More than forty years have passed since the day when the deepest well in the history of drilling operations was laid on the Kola Peninsula, near the city of Zapolyarny in the Murmansk region. Its goal was "pure" science - it was necessary to explore the lithosphere in the place where, at great depth, scientists expected to get a lot of interesting information. The age of the rocks studied was presumably estimated at 3 billion years - at this time the Earth was still very young.
The first years of drilling were not much different from the usual works during geological exploration of oil and gas deposits. Even the equipment used was familiar, serial. Below 2 thousand meters, the drilling string began to be completed with pipes, in the manufacture of which aluminum alloys were used - a multi-kilometer steel column simply could not withstand its own weight. The maximum achieved weight of the drill string is about 200 tons.

Even before reaching the 7-kilometer mark, the Kola super-deep began to present scientists with real puzzles. Boer drilled only one granite of different density, which did not think to be replaced by basalt. At a mile and a half deep, there were deposits of copper ore. After another 1.5 kilometers the composition of the raised sample of the rock turned out to be very similar to the soil samples delivered by the Soviet stations from the Moon. The temperature grew much faster than in the theoretical calculations. And the organic fossils found in the sample from a depth of 6.7 km caused scientists to question the earlier terms of life on Earth.
After reaching a depth of 7 thousand meters, the deepest well required the most modern methods at the time. By this time drilling was greatly complicated due to the passage of layered rocks with less strength. The drilling cycle took 24 hours, of which only 4 hours for proper drilling, the rest of the time there was a slow rise of the drill string to replace the drill bit that had become unusable during these hours . If it was clinically falling off within the borehole of the rock, when trying to climb, part of the column was cut off. It had to cement and continue drilling with the deviation of the tool, along a new branch.

Since 1979, the Kola Superdeep appeared official status "the deepest well in the world." In 1983, drillers took a 12-kilometer line. Next year, because of the break in the column, it was necessary to start again with 7 kilometers. In 1990, the Guinness Book of Records recorded a record reached on a new branch. It was 12.262 meters. And the first break in the column after this put the point in the project.

Waited for a new, more advanced technology, but it never appeared. Funding has been exhausted. The state was not interested in continuing the "journey to the center of the Earth." In 2008, the deepest well lost the equipment dismantled from it. Today it is abandoned, and its structures are slowly being destroyed. Specialists say that it is possible to restore the Kola superdeep, we only need to find tens of millions of rubles somewhere ...