Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Don't Make a Mountain Out of a Moho

Most everyone is familiar with the space race that took place in the 1960s between the Soviets and America,but I was unaware of another race between the two powers,a race to the center of the earth. They didn't expect to actually get to the center but rather to the Moho,which is a shortened term for the boundary between solid crust and magma filled mantle. The goal was to learn about how valuable ores formed and to see what else could be discovered. The Russians drilled the deepest hole in history,more than 7 miles deep. The name of the project was the Kola Superdeep Borehole and it took more than 15 years. As you might expect many urban legends sprung from this mission,the main one being how they reached a hollow center where the temperature  measured 2,000 degrees (it was really 180) and when they lowered a microphone distressed voices could be heard. From those rumors came the nickname for the project...the Well to Hell.

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