Kola superdeep well

The well is located in the Murmansk region , 10 kilometers west of the city of Zapolyarny . The well was laid in the north-eastern part of the Baltic Shield , in the area of ​​articulation of ore-bearing Precambrian structures typical of the foundations of ancient platforms . Unlike other largest super-deep wells , which were drilled for purely practical purposes - for oil, gas or exploration work , the Kola well was drilled exclusively to solve research problems. First of all, it is a confirmation of theoretical models of the structure of the lower layers of the earth's crust (granite and basalt), a search and study of the nature of the boundaries between them ( Konrad borders ) and the Earth’s mantle (the surface of Mokhorovichich ). However, neither a pronounced alternation of the layers of the lithosphere, nor any pronounced boundaries between them were discovered as a result of drilling.

Attempts at deep exploration of the bowels of the earth go back to antiquity. In the XIII century, the Chinese managed to dig wells with a depth of 1200 meters ^[7] . By the beginning of the 20th century, world science had accumulated a large amount of knowledge on the structure of the upper layers of the lithosphere. Several attempts have been made to drill ultra-deep wells to test theories on actual material. In 1930, Europe was able to drill the earth's surface to a depth of 3 km. In the late 1950s, the depth of the drilled wells increased to 7 km. In 1957, the United States began a similar project. In 1958, the Mohol project was created to drill crust beneath the Pacific Ocean . The project was so named after the Croatian scientist Andria Mokhorovich , who explored the earth's crust and mantle . Part of the name, “hole”, is translated from English into Russian as “hole”. However, the project was discontinued in 1966 due to lack of funding.

The most convenient places for super-deep drilling are areas of the earth's surface, where the thickness of the cover of sedimentary rocks has the most minimal values ​​or are completely absent. The Kola Peninsula is one of the few places on the continental surface of the Earth where the cover of sedimentary rocks is completely absent and the surface is composed of rocks of very ancient origin - their age is about 3 billion years (for comparison: the age of the Earth is estimated at 4.5 billion years). In 1968, for the final choice of the drilling site, the Kola Geological Exploration Expedition of Extra-Deep Drilling (Kola GRE) was created under the leadership of D.M. Actually, the Kola ultra-deep well was laid in 1970 , on the anniversary of the centenary of the birth of V. Lenin .

Drilling began on May 24, 1970 . To a depth of 7000 meters, the drilling went relatively quietly, the drill passed through homogeneous strong granites. After this depth, the drill head entered into less durable layered rocks. When passing through them, the wellbore began to crumble with the formation of caverns ^[8] .

As a result, the drill string stuck with the rock, and the head was cut off when trying to climb. The lost part of the drill string was cemented , drilling continued with the deviation of the drilling tool . Such accidents occurred repeatedly, therefore, drilling continued for several years ^[8] , and the structure of the well received the appearance of a tree crown with many branches.

On June 6, 1979, the well broke a record of 9,583 meters, previously owned by the Berta Rogers ( Oklahoma ) oil well. In the best years, 16 research laboratories worked at the Kola superdeep well; they were personally supervised by the USSR Minister of Geology .

In 1983, 12,066 meters were drilled and temporarily stopped - they were preparing for the International Geological Congress , which was to be held in 1984 in Moscow . On September 27, 1984, drilling was continued. At the very first descent, an accident occurred - the drill string broke. Drilling resumed from a depth of 7000 m.

By 1990, the new branch reached a depth of 12,262 meters. The column broke off again and drilling was stopped. In 1994, drilling stopped completely.

Due to uneven rock destruction, geological heterogeneities, and other reasons, the borehole was bent, and at the maximum depth, the deviation from the vertical of the wellhead was 840 meters ^[6] .

In 1997, the well was entered in the Guinness Book of Records, as the deepest in the world.

The history of well drilling is inextricably linked with the history of the operation of the research and production center at the well, since the drilling rig was part of the building complex of this research institution. After 1991, the research center began to decline. Officially, drilling was stopped in 1992. By 1995, funding for work had almost completely ceased. Instead of 500 people in the 1980s. According to the staffing table for April 2008, the SPC “Kola Superdeep” had 20 people ^[9] . In the same 2008, by the decision of the head of the department of the Federal Property Management Agency for the Murmansk Region, the scientific and production center at the well was liquidated “due to unprofitability”, within a few months after that, the complex of buildings of the SPC at the well was finally abandoned, the equipment was dismantled, and the destruction of buildings began ^{[10] [11 ] [11 ] ] [12]} .

Status for 2010, according to the comments of the director of the Geological Institute of the Kola Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences: the well is mothballed and gradually collapses. The cost of restoration is about one hundred million rubles. In his opinion, at the moment, it is possible to restore scientific equipment and open an institute for training offshore drilling specialists.

At present, the formal successor of the scientific and production center at the Kola superdeep well is Nedra Scientific and Production Center based in Yaroslavl ^[13] .

1. Study of the deep structure of the nickel-bearing Pechenga complex and the Archean crystalline base of the Baltic Shield in the Kola Peninsula region, clarification of the features of the manifestation of geological processes, including ore formation processes.
2. Clarification of the geological nature of seismic interfaces in the continental crust and obtaining new data on the thermal regime of subsoil, deep water solutions and gases.
3. Obtaining the most complete information about the material composition of rocks and their physical condition, opening and studying the border zone between the granite and basalt layers of the earth's crust.
4. Improvement of the existing and creation of new equipment and technology for super-deep drilling, as well as methods of complex geophysical studies of rocks and ores at great depths.

First, drilling was carried out by the Uralmash- 4E serial drilling rig , which is used for drilling wells in the search and exploration of oil and gas fields. From a depth of 7263 meters, drilling continued with the Uralmash-15000 installation.

Among the features that have adopted the best practices for drilling deep wells:

• The drill string below 2000 meters was assembled by pipes made of light aluminum alloys (steel would simply burst from its weight). The weight of the column is about 200 tons.
• Turbo - drill - a 46-meter-long turbine operating from the pressure of the drilling fluid rotates the drill bit ( chisel ).
• A core receiver is a removable pipe inside a turbodrill that serves to collect rock samples (core) .

Conventional carbide drill bits were used. One crown lasts approximately 4 hours, during which time it is possible to drill 7-10 meters. The descent and ascent of the column takes up to 18 hours. In this case, the column is disassembled into sections of several pipes.

Although it was expected that a pronounced boundary between granites and basalts would be found, only granites were found in the core throughout the entire depth. However, due to high pressure and elevated temperature, the physical properties of granites changed significantly.

As a rule, the raised core scattered from active gas evolution into the sludge , since it could not withstand a sharp change in pressure . It was possible to remove a solid piece of core only with a very slow rise in the drill, when the "excess" gas, while still in a pre-tensioned state, managed to get out of the rock ^[14] .

The density of cracks at great depths, contrary to expectations, increased. At the depth, there was also water filling the cracks.

Researchers identified 12 levels in the well, distinguished by physical properties. Deeper levels, as a rule, possessed higher isotropy (uniformity). At medium levels, high anisotropy suggested the tectonic activity of the layers.

Although in the course of the study a lot of valuable information was obtained about the bowels of the earth, the results were largely unexpected, and on their basis there was no clear understanding of the nature of the earth's mantle and the nature of the surface of Mokhorovichich .

At a five-kilometer depth, the ambient temperature exceeded 70 ° C, at seven - 120 ° C, and at a depth of 12 kilometers the sensors recorded 220 ° C ^[15] .

1. The geological and geophysical information on the deep structure of the Baltic Shield substantially refined the theoretical concepts that prevailed before the well was drilled. Based on a direct study of the mineral-geochemical composition of core rocks and a complex of geophysical studies in the wellbore, data were obtained on the material composition and physical condition of deep rocks, which significantly differed from the data of the section model compiled from geophysical data before drilling the well. Based on these data, a reasonable interpretation of geophysical materials has become possible, which plays an important role in the development of tectonic problems of geology.
2. The regular changes with the depth of the composition and properties of rocks are established. For the first time in a single section, the vertical zoning of rock metamorphism was revealed, which differs from the theoretical model, which was used to develop the theory of petrogenesis .
3. Various behaviors of free and bound water are established under progressive zonal metamorphism; the isochemical nature of petrogenic elements and a significant redistribution of impurity elements with increased metamorphism and especially with ultrametamorphism.
4. The geothermal regime of the ancient earth's crust has been experimentally clarified. A higher than expected geothermal gradient has been established. The role of mantle and radiogenic sources in the total deep heat flux is revealed. A significant contribution has been made to the development of a thermal model of the formation of the earth's crust, taking into account the real share of endogenous heat.

Only the wells drilled relatively recently in order to develop large gas and oil fields managed to break the record for the length (but not in depth) of the Kola superdeep well. Unlike Kola, these wells are deviated and drilled at an acute angle to the earth's surface.

The first was the Maersk Oil BD-04A oil well drilled in 2008 at an acute angle to the surface of the earth, with a length of 12,290 meters (located in the Al-Shahin oil basin, Qatar ) ^[16] . In January 2011, this record was broken by an oil well of the Odoptu-Sea field of the Sakhalin-1 project, also drilled at an acute angle to the surface of the earth, 12,345 meters long ^[17] , and in June 2013, by a Z-42 well of the Chayvinskoye field , length 12 700 meters ^[18] .

The Kola superdeep served as the source of the urban legend of the “well to hell” ( Well to Hell hoax ). This urban legend has been surfing the Internet since at least 1997 . For the first time in English, the legend was announced in 1989 on the air of the American television company Trinity Broadcasting Network , which took the story from the report of the Finnish newspaper published on “ April Fool 's Day ” ^[19] . According to this legend, in the very thickness of the earth, at a depth of 12,000 meters, the microphones of scientists recorded screams and groans ^[20] . In the tabloid newspapers they wrote that it was “a voice from the underworld” ^[21] , and in them the Kola superdeep well was called “the road to hell” - every new kilometer drilled brought misfortune to the country, and when the drillers drove the thirteenth thousand meters, the USSR collapsed .

When the well was drilled, supposedly to a depth of 14.5 km, they suddenly stumbled upon voids. Intrigued by this unexpected discovery, the drillers lowered a microphone there, capable of operating at extremely high temperatures, and other sensors . The temperature inside reached 1100 ° C - there was a heat of fire chambers, in which, allegedly, one could hear human cries ^[22] . But in reality, this legend is fiction, if only because the acoustic methods for investigating wells do not record the sound itself and not the microphone, but the wave pattern of reflected elastic vibrations excited by the emitting device with a frequency of 10–20 kHz and 20 kHz – 2 MHz to seismometers ^[23] . In fact, the depth at which drilling stopped was 12,262 meters with a fixed temperature of 220 ° C, which does not correspond to the main “facts” of the legend. The presence of acoustic microphones operating at temperatures above 1000 ° C should also raise doubts. Many other legends around the Kola superdeep well originated from ignorance. One of the earliest was in circulation in the USSR in the mid-1980s (appeared, at least not later than May 1987). It was about a demonic creature that climbed out of the ground through a drill pipe.

At the same time, in 1995, an explosion really occurred in the depths of the borehole, the cause of which was never established. Academician D. M. Guberman , the head of the well drilling work, said: “When they ask me about this mysterious story, I don’t know what to say. On the one hand, stories about the “demon” are bullshit. On the other hand, as an honest scientist, I can’t say that I know what exactly happened to us. Indeed, a very strange noise was recorded, then there was an explosion ... After a few days, nothing of the kind was found at the same depth ” ^[24] .

The legend served as the basis for the story of Dmitry Glukhovsky "From Hell" from the collection " Tales of the Homeland ."

• Ural superdeep well
• En-Yahinsky superdeep well
• Kola Science Center RAS

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• Popular Mechanics, November 2002, p. 28
• Vyacheslav Kondratiev. It is too early to bury the Super Deep (neopr.) . The Murmansk Bulletin (October 13, 2005). Date of treatment April 22, 2010. Archived on August 25, 2011.
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• Rezanov I. A. Ultra-deep drilling M., 1981
• “Kola superdeep: the last salute”
• “On the threshold of the underworld: Kola superdeep well”, Popular Mechanics, November 2010
• “Meters are milestones in life. The last interview with the creator of the Kola superdeep David Huberman, Murmansk Bulletin, 10/22/2011

•   Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kola Superdeep Well
• Kola experimental super-deep reference well - an article in the Kola North. Encyclopedic Lexicon »
• An article about the Kola superdeep well in the magazine " Around the World "
• Site dedicated to Kola superdeep well
• A. Osadchy Legendary Kola superdeep // Science and Life , No. 5, 2002
• Dmitry Misyurov . Kola superdeep at the turn of the century // sciam.ru, 2003
• Popov V.S., Kremenetsky A.A. Deep and superdeep scientific drilling on the continents
• Federal Property Management Agency liquidates the deepest well in the world
• The deepest Kola well on the planet is being eliminated // Kommersant
• Overview of the Kola superdeep, and other SGs at the Big Scientific Library
• Consolidated geological section of the Kola superdeep well at nedra.ru
• Denis Terentyev. Russian size (unopened) . Arguments of the week (October 25, 2012). Archived on November 4, 2012.
• Vladimir Korolev. Underground unearthly. What the deepest well in the world (rus.) Told about . Internet edition N + 1 (08/06/2016). Date of treatment March 19, 2018.
• How they abandoned the deepest well in the world // livejournal.com, August 1, 2016
• A hole in the underworld. How scientists won the super-deep drilling race // AiF , March 19, 2018
• Photo report on the trip to the Kola superdeep well in September 2017
• Website of NPC "Nedra"
• Topographic map
• “Hole to the Underworld” (plot of the Roscosmos studio , 2012)
• d / f Kola superdeep well ( TV Center )