Kola: The World’s Deepest Hole

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“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of "I Heart Radio."”

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck Sir II and Jerry's YouTube. Because this one's so exciting, Jerry said, "I wouldn't miss this one for the world." And this is a sufficient one. Unless I had some minor appointment or meeting that I could easily move. It's so great that Jerry just doesn't talk on this because we can say whatever we want,

and we can't hear what she's saying in response. Yeah, it would be fun as if we were doing our fun poking at Jerry sometimes, and she just cut in and said, "Go f*** yourself, guys." Right. I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.

Maybe we can beat that out. That'd be fun. We'll see. But yes, she's excited about this one, and she even said, "It's not going to be boring, or is it?"

And we said, "Jerry, pipe down. Boring. Wouldn't that be a Simpson thing? Boring." I don't know. It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy. Yeah, I feel like Reverend Lovejoy did that in a sermon one time that led them into a flashback or something. It's very distant memory.

It sounds like you're talking about the Mr. Sparkle episode where Marge becomes the listen lady at church, and Reverend Lovejoy's completely lost, like his pastoral sense.

And the flashback you're talking about is when he traces it back to the first time he met

Ned Flanders, who came to him for advice because he'd just done the bump, and his rear end touch the rear end of another young man, and he was up in arms about it. Maybe he was saying Boring, because it was a Ned Flanders flashback. It's possible. But he will know this one. I'm pretty sure it was loved by that.

Okay. And it didn't. Yeah, it didn't. We should have said that in the new season. Oh, that would have been great.

We're talking today not about the Simpsons, although we just have, and that's great. We're talking today about a different kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the United States. Got a lot less stress. Way less press. It got a lot less money and funding and, you know, attention and technology

and engineers and brains thrown at it. But I also wonder Chuck, if we downplay it because the USSR beat us so soundly at this particular race. Hmm, maybe, yeah, that's possible, because, yeah, of course we're not talking about going to outer space.

We're talking about Boring, deep into the Earth, and digging a deep hole. And we're going to talk about that now in the form of the Cola Borehole, K-O-L-A, and this started in the 1960s? Yes.

“Well, yes, I think the idea started in the '60s, but they started drilling in the”

'70s. Right. But let's not get ahead of ourselves because the Soviets were actually following the American

lead America made the first shot over the Soviet's bow by drilling into the Earth's

bow first. Yeah.

They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this. That's right. In 1958, we launched something called Project Mohol. And this was like, hey, let's dig down to the mantle. Let's get a sample off of Guadalupe Island.

Let's go through the ocean floor because the ocean's already deep. So let's just go ahead and start down there. And the name Project Mohol is a bit of a sciencey nerdy joke that plays on the Mohode discontinuity or discontinuity. How would you say?

The second one. Second one. And that is the Mohode discontinuity is the region where the crust and the mantle meet up and say hello. Right.

And this is theoretical, we should say it's named after a guy named A. I think it's Mohorovicic of Kareisha, who back in 1909, 1909, mind you, was studying seismic waves from earthquakes so closely that he realized that at some point in the Earth's crust, they actually like speed up, they hit some literal inflection point. And he was like, there's some sort of boundary there, maybe even a discount nudity is

chuckle later say. And he, well, it became, I don't think he named it after himself, but it became called the Mohode discontinuity, like you said.

It was hypothetical, it was theoretical, but one reason they named it that is because ultimately

the goal was to drill right through the crust into the mantle.

“That's what that's the money lithosphere.”

Yeah, for sure. And you know what, nothing turns me on more than scientifically speaking, then early science where they, someone got it right. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. It's fun to talk about bloodlighting and stuff like that, but I love it when somebody like way before they know about this stuff has an idea and it kind of boars bears out to be correct. I just love that stuff. So hats off to you, Croatian scientist, whose name I'm not going to try.

Yeah, if bloodlighting is wrong, I don't want to be right Chuck, very nice. I also want to give a shout out to the group of scientists, the informal drinking group called the American miscellaneous Society, or Amsock. Yeah, they seem fun. They came up with this idea in the '50s and it was one of many ideas that they had

most of which were just totally ridiculous and outlandish like towing icebergs to California to use for irrigation. This one actually had legs and it got funding from the National Science Association and they got to drilling like you said in Guadalupe and it got, it actually got funding from the National Academy of Sciences and they started drilling and, well, I guess what,

the Gulf of the Pacific, oh God, is Mexico and Island. Your desire for specificity gets you in so much trouble. Okay. Well, at any rate, they started drilling. Yeah.

Wow, that felt really good.

I've never tried that before.

Yeah, vagaries is my secret weapon.

“Okay, thanks for letting me in on it, I think I've just turned over a new leaf.”

Yeah, they got that funding. They made it down about just over 600 feet, which is not too bad. This to me is one of the more fun facts of the whole episode. I don't like this. John Steinbeck, the author, went along to document it.

Mm-hmm. Like, who should we get? I don't know. Steinbeck's pretty good. That's where he got the idea for the end of, of mice and men.

There was a, uh, one of the engineers accidentally dropped a, uh, a sample, very precious sample. Yeah. And rather than let the rest of the crew kill the guy in a terrible fashion, he snuck up behind him and took his life. That's good.

Wait, was Steinbeck the Pearl? Is that what his nickname was? The Pearl? No, it was. It was Pearl because that was about Pearl diving, so, uh, I'm pretty sure that was Steinbeck.

So he may, uh, obviously had some sort of interest in going under the sea. He did, actually. It's funny.

“You say that because he was a, I think a trained Marine biologist, or he was planning”

on going into Marine biology, never really lost his love of it.

Yeah, pretty cool. Uh, I always caught Chuck. Awesome project. Uh, they pulled the plug in 1966, or I guess, whether they stuck in the plug in 1966. Uh, when the US House representative said no more, no more drilling.

And then four years later, uh, the Soviets, uh, said off to do a deep drilling attempt when they drilled into the earth in, uh, Vermont, Russia, uh, this near the Norwegian border, uh, near the barren sea, and this is it. This is the cola super deep borehole, aka the deepest hole ever dug by human beings. Yeah.

Still.

Yeah.

“And it's named cola because it's on the cola peninsula.”

K-O-L-A. Did you spell it? Yeah. I love it. It's worth spelling again.

Yeah. And another time K-O-L-A. It's like a cola nut. Exactly. The thing is Chuck is for, as stupidious and achievement, as this is.

And if you're a geologist, if you're an earth scientist, basically of any sort, this

is a stupendous achievement that they carried out in Soviet Russia in the 70s and 80s, um, it's just been completely like left to rot. Did you see those pictures of it now? Yeah. I mean, you've walked right past the thing and not even notes there.

Right. And the reason why you could walk right past is because it's at the hole, the hole, I was going to say the hole hole, which makes sense, is only like nine inches in diameter. I think that's 23 centimeters. Yeah.

23 centimeters. Yeah. It's like I went caving that time and instead of walking into a big rocky cave, I like crawled into a small hole in the ground. Yeah.

I know. But that's the same deal. Like nine inches is very small. It is got a plate, um, secured over it with some old rusty bolts. Mm-hmm.

“And I think you found out they even etched on top what it was, but they got the number”

wrong, right? Yeah. As we'll see, the Colis super deep bore hole got all the way down to 12,262 meters into the earth's crust. We'll tell you about just how deep that is.

We'll put in perspective in a second.

But when they put the, when they wrote down how deep it was, they transpose the last two numbers. So they shorted it by 34, 36, 38 meters, maybe something around that. Yeah. It might be disappointing to know if you like, took some, uh, took a ranch out there.

And you're like, I got to drop a rock in that thing just to see if I can hear anything and took that plate off, uh, let's say you were able to, uh, you wouldn't be able to drop anything in it because just because of the earth's movement over time, it is no longer like, at least at that point, like a continuous hole. It's kind of shifted and, uh, full that and kind of caved in and places in this full of

gunk. It is in legend has it that if you had recorded the movements of the earth over that time span and played it back at fast speed, you would hear the earth going, "Wah, wah, wah!" As it subsided, the deepest hole in the planet. The saddest of drum bones.

Exactly. Uh, all right. So you promised to talk about how deep this thing was, uh, an intruse sufficient enough

to have a fashion, we're going to have several examples, none of which are big max surprisingly.

No, but there is a Domino's pizza reference in there. I was hoping it's not to not mention that. No, it's that specificity thing I have running through it. I'm just going to say it. The diameter, the hole is about as big around as a small piece of from Domino's there.

That's right.

“I think people are suspicious of all of our brand mentions, so I was trying to avoid”

those. Oh, really? Yeah. Come on, people. That's a thing, so this thing is deep deep deep.

It is about 7.6 miles deep about 12,262 meters or 40,230 feet deep. Like we said, the deepest hole ever, uh, it is lower than, it's deeper than the lowest point of the Mariana Trinch. That's pretty fun one. I'm sure.

Um, got a height. height perspective. It's, it's deeper than the highest point on Earth is tall, Mount Everest. In fact, it's so much deeper than Mount Everest is tall. You could put Mount Fuji on top of Mount Everest and the Kolaborho would still be deeper

than those two sect on top of one another. Yeah, so that's it. That's a deep thing, everybody. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. There's one more that knocks my socks off. Can I say it? It's probably the one I scribbled through. So yes, let's hear it.

It is deeper than the height of the average cruising altitude of a commercial airliner specifically Delta Airlines. Yep. That's a scratch right through that thing. I was like, we don't need that many examples.

I like that. All right. So this went down into the outer most layer of the Earth, which is continental crust. That is like what we're standing on right now. They wanted to reach the mantle.

With their technology, they thought they could get down to 9.3 miles, but only made it 7.6. That's right. Yes. And 9.3 miles sounds like a really weird goal, but it turns out that they were going

for 15 kilometers. Yeah. But they thought that was, I guess, out of reach if they figured 9.3 was reasonable. So yeah. Well, there was an article I found.

It's called going deep excavation, collaboration, and imagination at the Kola Super Deep Borehole, it was written by Charlotte Rigley and published an environment and planning deep, the journal in 2023.

answered them, because one of the things they thought is that this stuff is going to confirm

“all of the predictions that Earth scientists had made over time.”

And the fact that they thought they were going to get down 15 kilometers, and the reasons that they didn't get down that far, it's like a great example of what the Kola Super Deep Borehole did, which was take science and churn it up, like a huge swath of the Earth during an Earth quick. Yeah.

Totally. That's maybe a good time for a break. Yeah. Let's do that.

Everybody with more on this deep deep hole.

I'm Mungus, together, and I'm back for the new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of pet tides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones,

“and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about.”

And what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you, and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain. Here are some hard truths.

I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. Once they probably start bone smashing, that doesn't work. Make it look more defined.

They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive. How to live forever on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, senses and paragraphs

about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

“Why is it important for the darker part of the declaration of independence in the American”

Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it? Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself. I'm Rebecca Nagel.

This is first America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got

to this present moment. Listen to first America. On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Each dream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused stories that shane, m blame, and paint the unhoused as a monolith.

We the unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host and for years I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed on house parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, LGBQTIA plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that

impact the unhoused existence. With the unhoused as a two-time webbie and signal award winning show, with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wichord, a street doctor, turned in fluency, whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in

her community, listen to Weed the Unhoused on the iHard Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. So check which probably just do a quick primer of eighth grader science, maybe, of the layers of the earth, if you'll bear with me. So you've got the outermost layer, the crust, made up of the continental crust, which is

what we stand on and the oceanic crust, which is at the bottom of the sea, beneath that you've got the mantle, and by the way, the crust averages about 25 miles or 40 kilometers thick. After that, you've got the mantle way thicker, 1,800 miles thick, then you hit the outer core, you hit the inner core, which has a diameter of about 1,230 miles or 1,990 kilometers,

which happens to be about the distance from Tupika Kansas to Condike Buff's Bluffs Utah. Okay, these said that's the radius. That is, no, that's the diameter of the inner core, and then possibly there's also a super

That's right.

And that's where Ronnie James D.O. resides.

Oh, yeah. I think so. I've got to give a, a obligatory shout out to the greatest tattoo ever. Oh, okay.

“Remember that one of D.O. on somebody's forearm?”

Oh, yeah, yeah. So for those of you who don't know I'm talking about, there's a tattoo out there of Ronnie D.O. making like the devil horns, but the perspective is done in a way that it looks like D.O.'s arm turns into the person with the tattoos arm and finger. So they make the devil horns, and it looks like Ronnie D.O. is the perspective is just

that amazing. Yeah, the only problem is in a ballsy armpit, you know, yeah. It's really kind of the worst part of the body to me. The armpit? Not a fan.

To me, there's other parts that are a grocer, like the butthole. Sure, unless it's been recently bleached between the dos. Oh, my God, coming from the guy who just said, "But hold, now I'm offended." I got that from Bruno, remember the Sasha Baron Cohen movie, Bruno? Yeah.

You got what? Anobleaching?

Oh, set first time you heard of that?

Yeah, I hadn't heard of it before. Okay. Man, this is great. So, I mean, we are talking about super deep holes. So what we're trying to say is, while it is impressive to go down 7.6 miles, that

is like about a third of the earth's crust alone. So they were trying to get to the mantle, and that's just, I mean, that doesn't seem like it's possible that that could ever happen. Right. And it took years and years to do it.

They started this project on May 24th, 1970. And by 1979, they had broken all digging records. By 1989, they had reached that depth of 40,230 feet, which was kind of it. The project was open for a little while longer after that. But for reasons we will go over soon, you'll learn why that was basically about as deep

as they could go in 1989. They were like, "We can't get any deeper." Yeah, the one that, it's like the reverse perspective that gets me is that they dug 0.2 percent of the entire distance to the center point of the earth. So, like you said, it's impressive in some terms and other terms is just kind of a stupid

hole. You know? Yeah.

“And, you know, if you're wondering, like, why would they even do this?”

What's down there? There's a lot of reasons. There are a lot of deep holes all over the world, most of those are for, like, you know, mineral extraction or fossil fuel extraction or metals, you know, or things like that. There's the 100-year-old Bingham Canyon copper mine in Salt Lake City.

Yeah. Pretty great. Three-quarters of a mile deep, but two and a half miles across. So, that is a, it's no small pizza. No, there's another one called the Big Hole, it's in South Africa, it belongs to the Kimberly

Diamond Mine. It's one of the largest holes in the world with the caveat of holes that were dug by human hands in no machinery. It sounds pretty impressive, unless you realize that you can threaten to cut off those people's hands if they don't use them to dig, then you can get it done and I'm quite

sure that's what happened. Yeah, I did not even look into that and I just had great certainty that that was a completely exploitive experience. Well, even if it's not true, we should be forgiven because we're talking about South Africa, Diamond Mine's in giant holes dug by hand.

Yeah.

“That's what we can, it's a pretty reasonable surmization.”

Yeah. Surmization? I don't know. I love it. All right, so that's one reason why you can dig down is for minerals and fossil fuels and stuff

like that. But, you can also just learn a lot about science and we did learn a lot about science through, you know, the Soviets did and we did through our deep holes, but, you know, like you mentioned earthquake, obviously, G.O. hazards, they ended up learning a lot about that stuff and we'll detail that a little bit.

G.O. thermal heat and energy is another big one. Oh, I don't know. Maybe about climate change and what's happened in the past that you could find from digging deep or maybe just like, hey, we know a lot more about outer space than we do about what's under our feet.

So let's get down there and see what we can learn. Yeah, the place that they were digging. So like, we usually dig ice cores to kind of get an idea of climate change. Yeah. I mean, the fairly recent past we're talking on the order of tens of hundreds of thousands

of years. Yeah. The crust that they were digging into is pre-cane brain, meaning that it came together

and was formed from anywhere between the origin of Earth to 538 million years ago.

So it is super old. There's a lot of secrets that could be unlocked just by boring into it and looking at

So that's a good reason.

“Also fossil fuels, you really can't look past this is the 70s and 80s.”

So they're one of the stated goals of the KSB was to basically figure out new techniques

for drilling super deep oil wells, essentially, because they said that it would be a great benefit to mankind if we can learn how to dig out fossil fuels that are deeper that we can't currently reach. Yeah. For sure.

I mentioned promise of earthquake talk, they did just come up a lot lately, again. But they did learn a lot about that stuff. Like if you go really deep into these spotlines, you can detect these tiny minute quakes that you don't even feel top side where we are. And you know, all of that is usually about just learning how to get more accurate predictions

in the future, you know, they do like computer simulations and stuff but they need data input to do those simulations and these holes give you great data for that kind of thing. They also have figured out how to use all of that seismographic data to basically turn

the resonance or the way they resonate through Earth into images of inner Earth itself.

And that really kind of, I mean, you can get, if you're looking at mega colossal geology, there's no reason I would say to dig in anymore, like if we can do that kind of thing, I mean, dig to put, you know, deeper and deeper seismographs, but not necessarily find out what inner Earth is like because we can image it like that. In the same way that if you ever watch one of those cool archeological shows on BBC, sometimes

they'll have what looks like a, like a tamper, like a walk behind tamper. But it has a shotgun shell that you put into it and you shot a shotgun shell. Yeah. Geographic imageer and that shows you what's buried beneath the ground in that field or whatever. This is the same thing, except they're taking the data, not from the resonance from

a shotgun shell, but from the resonance of Earth quakes in Earth and turning those into images. Yeah. That's super cool. Yeah.

And you know, we also want to just like pull stuff out of there and see what it looks

like what's going on down there, like what our deep deep crust looks like when, you know, they bring stuff out, it's generally pretty crumbly by that point and kind of falls apart because of atmospheric pressure changes and stuff like that. So, you know, getting those pictures of what things look like in their sort of undisturbed state is beneficial.

Right. And if you're like, all these seem kind of flimsy, holes are, they're super deep holes. Are the greatest example of human's curiosity, just for the sake of knowing something new, then you'll find just about anywhere. Yeah.

Don't stifle that people? No. Give it the program.

“So another question you might have is, why did it take so long?”

And why is it so hard to do? And why aren't we able to just go deeper and deeper and deeper, like why they have to stop? Kind of all those big questions. Right. And you know, they didn't realize until they got started, I don't think they thought it was

going to be a cakewalk, but they didn't realize until they really started digging down there that it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and there's a lot of complications that can arise. They didn't at first. You found this YouTube site called Hathas Interesting that we're talking about the drill

bits. They did a great job through granite. They have, you know, it's like a boring drill bit. It's like a, you know, like a windy cone with like teeth on the outside of it. To, you know, to bore a hole.

It's kind of stuff they used to like board subway tunnels and, you know, all kinds of tunnels. Through mountain, but in this case, they're going straight down.

“Those can only work for about four hours until you need to replace that bit, like the”

bit wears off. And that's, only about 30 feet or so, depending on where you're digging and how hard that rock is. And then you can't just pop it off like a drill. You get from the hardware store and pop on another one.

Those bits took, you know, sometimes eight hours or more to change over. Then you start drilling again. And then once they hit about 4.3 miles, it was pretty smooth sailing up into that point, then it got much more dense and then things got just really, really tough at that point.

Yeah. The density of the rock really presented like a big problem for them. Like up to that point, like you said, it was pretty easy. It was just monotonous. Now it was really hard.

They were, they were on a front tier of vertical underground hole digging. And the reason why the density of the rock proved to be problematic is the denser rock would just push the drill bit over into less dense rock. So it made it really hard to keep going straight down because the drill bit, it needs to get purchased.

But it's way easier to get purchased in less dense rock than the dense rock.

That created also lesser known thing about the coal of super deep borehole.

“And that is, it is not a single straight vertical shaft.”

Yeah, it's nice to think of it that way, like they just drilled straight down. But when the encounter that really, really tough rock, the drill bit will like get kicked to the side, starts going a different way. They tried to, that presents problems in and of itself, like they tried to use still pipes to reinforce the sides as they went.

Great. A lot, Charlie Bronson in the greatest scape. But the deeper they went, those pipes, we're having trouble with standing the pressure. So they might break, or they might kick out of line. And then they have to fill that hole up to where they were, go back above it, and then drill

down around it. And so it looks more like a Christmas tree when you're going down. And if they had too much, like a drill bit broke off completely, or maybe the sides that piping caved into much, and they couldn't get around it, they would have to go on like a fishing expedition to try and get that stuff out.

And that would knock them offline for, you know, days at a time. Yeah, the article by Charlotte Ridley says that one of their fishing trips took five years, five years. And so to get around the rock, and also to keep from just standing around for five years, they would start another hole.

Yeah. But the reason why everybody calls it the super deep bore hole, not bore holes, is because there is one central shaft, and then the other holes branch off of that. Yeah, exactly, right. So the depth that they got to, 12,262 meters, that's the depth, the actual length that

they drilled all over the place is, I'm not, I didn't see the actual length, but it seems like it's a lot more than that. Yeah, for sure. So they'd still, they kind of figured out a work around for the rock density problem.

“And then I think at about, well, a 10,000 feet less than, or just over 3,000 meters,”

they encountered an issue that they, they couldn't, they found they eventually couldn't overcome. Yeah. And that was temperature. They kind of had guesstimated correctly up into that point, what the temperature was

about, you know, what it was, they thought it was going to be at least. And they were like, this, that'll be fine. But once they reach that point, there was a big jump. It went from, what was the initial number, like, two, 14 or so degrees, all the way up to 356 degrees Fahrenheit, or 180 degrees Celsius.

And that was about 12 clicks down about seven and a half miles. And as you heard at the beginning, it only went down 7.6 miles. So it was that, it was the heat that got them. The heat, my god, the heat. Not even the humidity, the heat, all the way, we'll find it's possible that it's humid

down there. Oh. What it's easy. That's a really great example of how the super deep borehole, like, rewrote science, is they were, they, they mapped it all out there.

Like, we're going to get to 15 kilometers because we'll be able to withstand the temperatures until then. And then all of a sudden, it got way hotter, way faster.

So much so that the, basically, what happened with the pressure and the temperature together

turned the rock in that area, essentially, plasticky, and not even like a hard plastic, like a chlorox bleached bottle. It was like a squishy plastic. Yeah. And it was basically like nailing, gelobrain gelatin to the, to the wall.

That was what they were trying to do at that point. Yeah. So I mean, at that point it was net, it was over. They realized that they had gone as far as they could go. That was 1989, like I said at the beginning, they kept trying for another few years.

I think it's a 1992. Yeah. And then they were like, yeah, this is really over. And I think the whole project was officially sealed in 2005. But I mean, they had a lot of employees and stuff, you know, that were on the books.

“I think they weren't even paying them for a while, right?”

I think that it's peak there, like 700 people who were employed there. If you look at pictures of the place when it was in full swing, it looks like a huge factory with one single giant smoke stack. And that's actually where the Derek for the drill bit went. But it's like a little mini town almost.

But as it got shut down further and further, and they finally fully mothballed it in 2008.

Those last few employees, yeah, they hadn't been paid in six months. But the reason why it really stopped in 1992 is because they had bigger fish to fry, which was their country had dissolved and now they had to figure out where to get funding from and it turned out that no one, none of the oligarchs were in any particular mood

in three or four years. Yeah.

“It was, you know, any stagnant project like that is not sexy anymore and very easy to shut”

or I think.

Maybe we should take a break and we'll talk about what we learned from this super de-bore

hole. I'm Mungisha, together. And I'm back for the new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about.

And what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths.

“And I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to”

five year acceleration.

And get myself into a world of trouble.

I'd say probably start bone smashing, but it doesn't work. Making a lot more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, how to live forever on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever

you get your podcast. Each dream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused stories that shane, m blame, and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We the unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm the ohenderson creator and host and for years I've created a space where the unhoused

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your podcast. The declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, senses and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

“Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence in the American”

Revolution? Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself. I'm Rebecca Nagle, Goheen Dawidol Jolika Yadli Gaila, Citizen of Cherokee Nation.

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be.

And how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America, on the iHard Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we actually discovered a lot scientifically speaking by going down that low though.

The first thing they did was like, well, I guess let's do the obvious thing and change our temperature maps because now we know at what point it gets super, super hot. So who's got an eraser? Ivan, you have an eraser, you have the only eraser in the room, step forward, and change those numbers, and they're like, that's a great start and let's move on from here.

So that was one thing, they also disprove something that had been around since the 30s. So we talked about the Mohode discontinuity, which is between the mantle and the crust, way further down than they went. But they had expected to go through another discontinuity that was in the upper crust. It was upper crust.

The Conrad discontinuity, which was also based on the same thing, this guy Conrad paying attention to seismographic waves suddenly accelerating or speeding up, when it hit this one point in the crust, there's a discontinuity there. I predict that it's a difference between granite and basalt that we've got the granite up top,

and it turned out that that was not correct. They were kind of mean about it, they called Conrad's descendants and told them and mocked them over the phone. Yeah, well, I thought it was Conrad bane, and they called Todd Bridges. So actually, his heir, Victor Conrad, you know what just occurred to me, I believe when I said

“discontinuity, I bet you that's how the Brits say it.”

I'll bet you're right. I'd love to hear from our friends about that. I would love to hear that too. We asked Kyle. Yeah, but then we'd have to send a voice message.

And I wonder what Kyle sounds like, actually, I wonder what all of our writers sound like. We know Dave sounds like because we met him. Yeah, that's a great question, just believe in my top, put it like, we love Olivia so much, what if we got in touch with Olivia and she was like, "Juttlewood," she's like a Julia child or something. All right, that would be so fun.

It would be quite surprising. All right, so you teased liquid, very cheekily earlier, and they discovered that there was liquid water down there, like much, much deeper than they thought water could exist. They found these cracks that had saline filled water, and they were like, this shouldn't be here.

This is crazy. Liquid is actually flowing down here. The Soviets released that information, and most of the world it versus like, yeah, right. Like, we're going to buy that coming from you.

Right, so yeah, the first 14 years from 1970 to 1984, the USSR, which was very famous for

keeping its scientific progress and finding secret, it didn't share anything about this. I'm not even sure the outside world knew that they were digging a hole, and then in 1984 at a geological conference, like a world geological conference, that they actually held in Moscow, they announced that they had dug the world's deepest hole and blew everyone away. And it seems like the reason that they held this conference in 1984 was that they just had

dug the world's deepest hole and they wanted to tell everybody. Yeah, but it's kind of funny that they didn't believe certain parts of it because it was coming from the former Soviet Union, you know. Right, well, this was full on Soviet Union, too, in 1984.

“Oh yeah, yeah, but yeah, they were like, how, how would this even happen?”

Like, explain to us how they're water? Yeah, so what they found out was that, well, at first they thought that it was squeezed out of crystals, perhaps, pretty good guess, but they found out the opposite was true, because the study in 2023, they found out with that when these continental plates subduct, which we've talked a lot about lately, like go under one another and into the mantle in this

case, they take water with them along the way, and that can make it all the way to that outer core. It interacts with that molten iron, I think, and creates this kind of kind of filmy look between the core, and then that presses into crystals. Right, did you know that you could press

water into crystals? I didn't know any of this stuff. No, I also didn't know you could get water from crystals, but think about like the mind-boggling

“pressure that suggests are going on at this point in the earth, you know?”

Yeah, for sure. It's so cool. Probably the biggest thing that everybody's socks were knocked off by was that they were like, oh yeah, by the way, seven kilometers down, almost four and a half miles, under the Earth's

surface, we found marine organism fossils dating back like 2 billion years, top that comrades.

Pretty fun, and I bet they were spooky looking, like, you know, I saw Garfish the other day when I was paddle boarding in a lake, and I almost fell off because I looked down and it was right at the surface on my left, and you know, Garfish, those like two and a half feet long. Yeah. I reacted with such a start, I went, oh my god, that I lost my balance and almost fell off the paddle board. And then I had a fear of, you know, this thing was some prehistoric creature

that was going to attack me once I was in the water, which is, of course, not true, that thing was out of there. This isn't second at saw me. Right. But just imagine these fossils down there, I mean, this thing said to have like teeth, they had to be creepy, right? I don't know. I didn't find any pictures of them. Two billion years ago, I'm not sure. I've got to picture my mind. It looks like an alligator gar. Okay, that's great. Let's go with that.

All right. But the thing is that it doesn't suggest as a lot of sites who sensationalize the super deep borehole, as we'll see. This doesn't mean that these things were ever dwelling, like four and a half miles beneath the Earth's surface. Right. Right. Right. This, these were embedded

two billion years ago, and then carried down through the cross toward the mantle as part of that

amazing plate-tectonic process that keeps the Earth going. Yeah. I mean, what I wonder is if, I mean,

with today's technology to reach the mantle, and if anyone is interested in that anymore.

“I wonder if it was, if I think I'm sure that there are geologists in scientists who are still”

quite interested in doing that. You know, they want to. Right. And you want the funding dollars. Exactly. Yeah. Because I don't know that there's much, much to be gained from, you know, reaching the mantle if you're a fossil fuel company. And that's, if you're not getting money from governments for digging deep holes, you're getting it from fossil fuel companies. They probably, I would estimate, fund 90% of the holes that are being dug around the world right now. They're like,

is there a giant bag of money down there? Exactly. Yeah. They're like, no, no. But not exactly. Well, you lost my ear. Yeah. They're like, get rid of this guy. So yes, though, it's possible that some scientists will make it to the mantle. And the reason why is because they will be drilling not through, you know, super thick parts of the crust, but thin thin parts of the oceanic crust. Right. And that counts. It definitely counts because you're still reaching the mantle. Yeah.

Exactly. No, there's some places where the crust is so thin. How thin is it? It's so thin.

It's only five and a half kilometers thick. And that is, yeah, that's, you know, almost a third

of the depth of of the coal that's super deep or yeah, that's 1960's level digging. Exactly. So there was actually a group that I guess was attempting that they dug in a site off the coast of Costa Rica. They dug hole 1256 D. They need to step up their naming convention. I think maybe that's thanks for Domino's. It probably doesn't say sponsored it. The noise was on board. Yeah. In the early 2000s, they started digging. And I guess the noise got bored and stopped giving

them money. Yeah. Yeah. How far did they get stopped at 1.25 kilometers? Which is so deep. So shallow. We're not even going to bother translating that into miles. Exactly. But what kind of one of the fun things is they, they removed an intact piece of crust. Yes, it did. It's a marinara. I couldn't resist. This went so off the rails with the, with the Domino's theme that I've really tried to avoid and then embraced. If you like their marinara,

“you should try their garlic butter dipping sauce. Man. I don't think sponsors. I don't know.”

They really should. Which these were ads, everybody? I would probably do Domino's ads for free pizza. I am ashamed. Well, not ashamed. I'm proud to say maybe I haven't had a Domino's pizza since probably college. That's, that's our go-to pizza if we get giant chain pizza. Really? Yeah. It's still love Domino's. I guess I don't get any giant chain pizza. Not as a stand. We just have so many good pizzaries in Atlanta all over the place. Yes. That is true. There are not as many in

Florida. No, okay. I don't know why, but there's not. But yes, Atlanta is filthy rich with really good pizza places. I thought you were going to say that like, you may have mama wouldn't stand for anything that doesn't get there in 30 minutes. Or it's free. I'm hungry. Now Josh, you know that. Yeah, no, there's just not that many around you. All right. Well, maybe we can take a meeting with

“sales and turn this into a liquid gold. Yeah. Can I have your free Domino's? If that's how they”

taste? Okay. Sweet. We should mention this last little agenda. It was kind of fun. The Germans, of course, they tried to dig a deeper hole in the 90s and they actually got to some higher temperatures. They're bits, the German bits were able to withstand 500 degrees Fahrenheit or 260 degrees Celsius.

So that was a big breakthrough. But they stopped at about five and a half or 5.6 miles down

or nine kilometers. But the cool part about it, this is they got a Dutch artist name, Lotto Given. I don't know, I'm not sure if that's pronounced right. She lowered her microphone down in there. Obviously protected by, you know, heat, shields and stuff like that. Sure. Dropped it down that German borehole and picked up a very rumbling sound that science still cannot explain. And she said it made her feel very small. First time in my life, this big ball that we

live on came to life and it sounded haunting. And she said some people thought it sounded like hell or like the planet was breathing. So it's like, you know, that came from an old Russian sort of suspicion that they were digging into hell, right? Yeah. There was an urban legend that started about the time they stopped digging at the borehole that said that the reason that they stopped digging was because they had a punctured through the roof of hell and that somebody had

And there are actual YouTube videos that present this seriously and you can go here and it's

the most ridiculous thing you'll hear today. But I also want to point out that what is it, Lottie Gervin? Given? Yeah, yeah. Like you said that scientists can explain the sound that she actually did record. That's not to say like that's a supernatural sound. There's so many processes going on down there and it's so little understanding that part of the earth we can't say what what makes that sound. But we think it's a pretty cool sound and maybe someday we will be able to explain it.

What they are quite sure about is that is not the sounds of hell. Yeah, because that's not a real

“place. Yeah. You should go listen to our episode on Hell. People. It was a pretty good one.”

Yeah. You know, I imagine that there's just sounds like the the groan or something moving around probably makes a sound, right? Yeah. It sounds really, really industrial. But there's no pattern to it. So like a dispedant industrial sound is what it sounds like. It's still it's pretty faint. I bet some German musician turned that into a beat or something. Yeah. Let's see. I think that's about it. Yeah. That's about it. Great. Okay. Well that was the coolest super deep bore hole everybody

hope you enjoyed it. Sorry for the anal bleaching references. And I guess since I mentioned anal bleaching again, it's time for listen and mail. In fairness, you can't talk about the coolest super deep bore hole without talking about that. Agreed. You know. All right. I'm going to call this feedback from the mash episode. Hey guys, thank you for the episode of mash. I was seven

“years old in 1972 and I really love the show so much that I learned to play the themes on”

the piano. My parents were too happy to find out that the song discussed suicide. But I don't even think I knew what that was at the time. Also, there was at least one episode because you guys talk about the camp moving where there was a bug out where the camp moved closer or far there from the front lines. And we got someone else at road in that said the same thing and that sort of the joke on the show is that it was like kind of exactly the same. Okay. Because they clearly didn't

move this at. And then Dana Carson from Cleveland also says this, it never occurred to me actually that

BJ and Hawkeye were alcoholics. I just assumed they drank to pass the time. Yeah, sure. Just like alcoholics. Right. Yeah. I mean, I threw that word around, you know, it was just sort of so supposed to be funny. Maybe they were just enjoyed drinking in the hellish more they ran to pass the time. Yeah. I think it was a device to just show like you had to self-medicator as you go crazy from the horror of the whole thing. Uh, and that is Dana Carson from Cleveland.

She says in a PS I've been to Toledo and Tony Pacco many times. Awesome way to go, Dana. Right. Dana. Great. Thanks a lot, Dana. There's actually a day in a corporation in around Toledo.

“If I'm not mistaken, maybe the same day after you, Dana, you should go find out. Cool.”

If you have a name like a corporation around Toledo, say like Libby or Owens or Jeep, we want to hear from you, you can email us at [email protected]. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The world cup is underway and it's been incredible. On our podcast, the iHeartRadio app with

Danielle Alarcon and John Green, we're talking about the games that have delighted us. The teams that have inspired us, what we're loving and what surprises us, all through lens of being massive fans of the world's most beautiful game. Daniel, this tournament has been magical so far. There's so much to love that I can hardly believe the drama that the group stage brought us. And now it's time for us to talk about the teams that are left as the field is

whittled down to one world cup champion on July 19th. Listen to the way in with Danielle Alarcon and John Green on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mungisha Together and I'm back with a new season of my podcast skyline drive. This time I talked to scientists, biopunks, crumudions, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryo therapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us.

And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I don't know. Listen to skyline drive, how to live forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For years, the unhoused have been presented as a monolith and mainstream media.

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