The Cold War Made the Soviets Drill the Deepest Hole Ever… Then They Sealed It Shut

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]It started as a competition.

[00:00:03]Not a scientific one, a war.

[00:00:07]The year was 1970. The Cold War was at its peak, and the United States [music] and the Soviet Union were racing each other in every direction possible.

[00:00:17]Space, [music] nuclear weapons, technology.

[00:00:22]And then someone in Moscow had a different idea.

[00:00:26]What if instead of reaching for the stars, they drilled [music] straight into the earth and went deeper than any human had ever gone before?

[00:00:36]The Americans had already tried something similar.

[00:00:40]A project called Project Mohole attempted to drill through the ocean floor into the earth's mantle.

[00:00:47]It failed. It was canceled.

[00:00:51]The Soviets looked at that failure and saw opportunity.

[00:00:55]They chose a remote location on the Kola Peninsula in Northwestern Russia, just a few kilometers from the Norwegian border.

[00:01:04]A place so cold and so isolated that even today most people could not point to it on a map. And in 1970, they began to drill. Nobody outside the Soviet Union was supposed to know this was happening.

[00:01:20]The team was made up of Soviet [music] geologists and engineers, some of the most brilliant scientific minds the USSR had ever produced.

[00:01:30]They were given unlimited funding, state-of-the-art equipment, and one clear instruction.

[00:01:38]Go deeper than anyone has ever gone before. For years, they did exactly that.

[00:01:45]By 1979, they had already broken [music] the world record for the deepest hole ever drilled. They passed 9,000 m, then 10,000, then 11,000.

[00:01:59]And the deeper they went, the stranger things became.

[00:02:03]At around 7 km down,