The Kola Borehole for Dummies

Mirny Diamond Mine

Among the staffers here at the Antisocial network who have a scientific bent, little is more frustratingly amusing than observing the goofy manner in which the scientifically illiterate mangle facts during their freelance forays into the worlds of STEM topics. Take, for instance, UniverseToday.com contributor Jerry Coffey, who liberally reworded an article that was probably more authoritative to write his post "Deepest Hole in the World."

Coffey's tenuous grasp on the facts and the science of the Kola Superdeep Borehole (the subject of the post) is pretty obvious from the get-go. The reason we say that? Coffey pinpoints the KSB, as it's called, as a location,

"...on the Kola peninsula of Russia near the Norwegian border..."

He was right about that. What he was wrong about, however, is that the words appear in the figure caption for a photograph of a gigantic hole. Coffey's mistake is that the image is of the Mirny diamond mine, in eastern Siberia. Right country, yeah, but Coffey got pretty much everything else wrong. The KSB maxed out at about 12 kilometers deep and was 23cm in diameter; the Mirny Mine (second deepest open-pit mine in the world) is 525 meters deep and 1200 meters in diameter at the surface. Oops? wrong "hole"?

We were also amused by the tortured science included in Jerry's prose; concepts such as,

• "The deepest hole in the world being drilled at the Kola well has now penetrated about halfway through the crust of the Baltic continental shield, exposing rocks 2.7 billion years old at the bottom." – That's not much different from the age of the rocks at the surface, Jer.
• "One of the more fascinating scientific findings to emerge from this well is that the change in seismic velocities was not found at a boundary marking(Jeffreys’ [sic] hypothetical transition from granite to basalt), but it was at the bottom of a layer of metamorphic rock that extended from about 3.5 to about 9.8 km beneath the surface." – Ummm, Jer? The seismic velocity of gneiss is almost indistinguishable from that of granite...

• "Free water should not be found at these depths." – Why not? the boiling temperature of water is affected by pressure. At a pressure of 5 atmospheres, the boiling pressure of water has increased by 50% to 150°F.
• "This could only mean that water which had originally been a part of the chemical composition of the rock minerals themselves had been forced out and prevented from rising by a cap of impermeable rock." – Maybe: after all, the rock is metamorphic.
• "This discovery has an impact on geophysical sciences and there is a potential economic impact. This water is very highly mineralized, and is a primary concentrating agent for most ore deposits. The technology for mining at these depths is not yet available." – We probably won't see mining at 30,000 feet any time soon, Jerry.

Coffey completed his half-fast job of mangling the science by "telling" his readers that, "As drilling continues at the deepest hole in the world many scientists are hoping for additional discoveries and a greater understanding of the inner workings and makeup of our planet." Jerry? When you wrote this in 2010, the Kola Superdeep Borehole project had been abandoned for 18 years. And people wonder why you're the Dumbass of the Day!

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