Soviet Scientists Dug 12.2 Km Into The Earth, They Had to Seal It Forever

To date, human beings have walked on the surface of the Moon, which sits about 384,000 kilometers away from us. We have sent a spacecraft beyond the edge of our solar system, more than 24 billion kilometers from where you're sitting right now. But there is one place, far, far closer than any of those, that we have barely managed to touch. A place directly beneath your feet. The inside of our own planet. In the spring of 1970, a team of Soviet scientists set out to do something no one had ever done before. They were going to drill a hole straight down into the Earth, as deep as they possibly could, to see what was really hiding beneath the crust. They expected the project to take a few years. It ended up consuming the next two decades of their lives. And when they were finally forced to stop, they had carved a wound into the planet more than 12 kilometers deep. Deeper than the deepest point of the ocean. Deeper than Mount Everest is tall, with kilometers to spare. The single deepest hole humanity has ever made. And then, after all of that effort, after twenty years and millions of rubles and the work of hundreds of people, they did something that makes absolutely no sense at the surface level. They abandoned it. They walked away. And eventually, someone welded a heavy metal cap over the opening, bolted it down, and sealed the deepest hole on Earth shut. Forever. Why would anyone spend twenty years digging the most ambitious hole in human history, only to slam the lid on it and never go back? What did those scientists find down there in the dark, 12 kilometers below the surface, that made sealing it the only option? Officially, the answers are clean and scientific. Unofficially, the stories that came crawling out of that borehole are some of the most disturbing in modern history. Stories of water that should not exist, of rock that behaves like a living thing, of two-billion-year-old corpses, and, according to some, of sounds recorded from the deep that no human being was ever meant to hear. For several days, I went down a rabbit hole of my own, reading every document, every interview, and every wild claim I could find about the Kola Superdeep Borehole. The result of my digging? A whole lot more questions than answers. This might just be the most fascinating hole ever dug into the face of the Earth. And by the end of this video, you're going to understand exactly why they had to seal it.