101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [31]
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Chapter 44
The Bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole
Everyone knows about the U.S.-Soviet Space Race of the 1960s. But few people are aware that at the same time the two countries were vying to hurl manned spacecraft into orbit, they were also sprinting in the opposite direction: toward the earth’s core.
Or, to be more specific, toward something called the Mohorovicˇi´c Discontinuity, thought to be the boundary between the earth’s crust and its magma-filled mantle. America was the first to try—in 1957 it launched Project Mohole, a later-abandoned plan to reach the so-called Moho by drilling through the ocean floor. Distracted by a different, equally important project—launching the first dog into orbit—the Soviets didn’t get started on their own Project Moho till 1962, and started drilling in 1970. But while they may have lost that first battle, the Soviets won the war: at more than seven miles deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest hole in the world.
Why were the two countries racing toward this particular goal? At first, the answer seemed to be: why not? I mean, dude. It’s the world’s deepest hole.
But there were also scientific reasons, and as the Soviet team drilled (and drilled and drilled), taking core samples along the way, its members discovered everything from unexpected water to fossils some four miles underground. They also disproved their own assumptions about how quickly things heat up: by the time they reached their stopping point, the rock was so hot that it was malleable, flowing closed whenever the scientists replaced the drill bit. In order to continue, the project would have required new heat-resistant technology and massive renovations to its equipment.
Unfortunately, official interest in the hole had waned in the twenty-four years since the project began. And so, much to the chagrin of workers who had spent two decades in a remote outpost boring a hole into rock, drilling stopped in 1994, just 1.7 miles short of the goal.
These days the hole’s core samples—the last of which was estimated to be over 2.7 billion years old—are housed about six miles south of the drilling site. But to people not acquainted with the works of Russia’s State Scientific Enterprise on Superdeep Drilling and Complex Investigations in the Earth’s Interior, the hole is basically unknown. Which, when it comes to would-be visitors, might be a good thing—the Kola Superdeep Borehole is only about nine inches wide.
Chapter 45
The Inside of a dB Drag Racer During Competition
There are a lot of idiotic activities out there, but dB—short for decibel—drag racing must come in toward the top of the list. It’s an obscure international sport in which people outfit their cars with tons of sound equipment. Then they compete to see whose stereo can make the loudest noise.
When I say tons, I mean it literally: one dB drag racer profiled by Popular Science was the proud owner of an eighteen-year-old Dodge Caravan that weighed ten thousand pounds. Too heavy to drive, too cramped to carry a passenger, the car’s sole purpose was to make a 74 Hz sound—known in the dB drag racing world as a “burp”—as loudly as possible.
Competitors soup up their cars in all sorts of ways. To increase sound pressure inside the car, which in turn raises the intensity of the noise, racers bolt the doors shut and fill them with concrete. They replace the windows with Plexiglas—many of the burps are loud enough to shatter glass. During competition, teammates gather around the car and push against it from all sides, sometimes lying spread eagle on the roof to try to increase pressure at the moment of the burp. The resulting noise is what the writer from Popular Science described as “what you hear when you inadvertently turn your home stereo on with the volume all the way up and a loose speaker wire: