The Deepest Hole on Earth: The Screams Were Fake. The Core Wasn't.

In 1970, on a rocky peninsula in the far north of the Soviet Union, scientists started drilling a hole.

They wanted to find out what the Earth's crust was really made of. Not by guessing. By going down and bringing it up.

They drilled for nearly twenty years. In 1989 the Kola Superdeep Borehole reached 12,262 meters.¹ More than twelve kilometers. It is still the deepest hole humans have ever dug. It is only about nine inches wide at the bottom.¹

What they found surprised everyone. The rock was so hot, about 180 degrees Celsius, that it behaved almost like plastic and kept closing around the drill.¹ There was water down there, squeezed out of the rock and trapped. At around six kilometers they found microscopic fossils, the remains of tiny ocean plankton, perfectly preserved, from billions of years ago.¹

In 1992 the drilling stopped. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the money ran out. The site was abandoned. Today the hole is sealed under a small, rusted metal cap, bolted shut, in the middle of a ruin.¹

Around the same time, a story began to spread.

It said that Soviet scientists had drilled so deep they broke through into a hollow space. That they lowered a microphone into it. That they heard screaming. Millions of voices. The sound of Hell.²

The story first appeared in a Finnish newspaper in 1989, then spread through American Christian broadcasting, then all over the world. There was even a recording.²

It was a hoax. The recording was later traced to a horror movie soundtrack, slowed down and edited.² Nobody at Kola ever lowered a microphone into anything.

That part is true.

Irina Volkova's grandfather had worked at Kola for eighteen years. He was a drilling engineer. He had been there in 1989 when they hit 12,262.

He never talked about it. When the Well to Hell story went around, and people asked him, he laughed. "There was no microphone," he said. "There were no screams. There was only rock."

He died in January. Irina went to Murmansk to clear out his apartment.

Under his bed was a case. Heavy, padded, lined with lead. Inside was a section of rock core in a steel sleeve, about as long as her forearm, gray and black, with a faint shine. A page from a drilling log, dated 1989. And a cassette tape labeled in her grandfather's handwriting.

The last core. Do not listen.

Irina was a geology student. She knew what she was holding.

The deepest core samples from Kola were scientific treasures. Every piece had been catalogued and stored. This one was not catalogued. The log page said why.

Core recovered from final run, 12,262 m. Sample warm on retrieval. Warmer than the mud, warmer than the bit. Temperature rose after retrieval. Sample withheld by order of the chief engineer.

Crew reports a sound from the sample in the core shed. Low. Rhythmic. Recorded on cassette at 02:00.

Chief engineer orders: the cassette is not to be played. The sample is not to be cut, heated, or exposed to light for more than a minute at a time. The hole is to be sealed.

He says the rock was not hot because it was deep. He says the rock was hot because it was alive.

She looked at the core in her lap. It was warm.

Thirty-five years in a lead case under a bed in Murmansk, in January. And it was warm.