Personally, I liked more the Slate version from an editorial point of view. Since there was no lifting involved and the Slate version is stuffed with links to the original version, I made a choice. Ironically the Atlas Obscura Facebook page links[0] to the Slate version.
I am not sure how these hosted blog deals work, but could it be that the author gets paid for clicks on the slate article but not on his own website? Would make sense for him to post a link to slate on his facebook page then. If so, changing the link probably took a good chunk out of his revenue on that article.
If it is that hot down at the bottom - ~200 degrees C depending on where the bottom is, is there no way to economically generate power with some type of steam turbine dropped down the hole? If you could get the steam turbine to power the drill then you could make it all the way to 'China' by teatime...
I believe the last time something like that was contemplated the analysis was that the energy you could extract would make for very very slow going (not surprisingly it requires a lot of energy to bore through rock and remove the excess). Assuming a return pipe to the surface the deeper it is the higher the boiler pressure you can support since you can use the cold water return column to pressurize the feed. Of course at some point your at the limit of your boiler as well.
Not a heat pump, simply a heat engine (if you're taking the work) or heat source (if you're using the heat). "Pumping" implies going against the gradient.
So how is the drilling actually conducted? Is there basically a miles-long, rapidly-spinning, articulated shaft with a drill bit at the bottom and a motor at the surface? What sorts of weird and wonderful engineering challenges do you run into with that sort of setup, especially as your giant drill grows larger than 10 miles in length?
Generally, the shaft would rotate with a drill bit at the bottom. But, it seems in the case of Superdeep Borehole, they developed a new mechanism to rotate only the drill bit at the bottom of the shaft[1]. They pumped pressurized "drilling fluid"[2][3] down the shaft to spin the drill bit.
Watching Cosmos last week had me thinking about how deep we'd drilled to date. I meant to go look it up but didn't. Thanks for posting.
It saddens me/blows me away we've only gone 7.5 miles (into the 22 mile crust). It also reminds me how fragile our biosphere is and how little we really understand it.
Any picture of the Earth should have a giant fucking question mark right in the middle of it. That scientists and publishers egotistically declare their theories as truth actually drives any sense of wonder out of children contemplating a life of discovery. It's sick and irresponsible.
Science. The article: "The most intriguing discovery made by the Kola Superdeep Borehole researchers was the detection of microscopic plankton fossils four miles beneath the surface of the earth." and "The Kola Core Repository in the nearby town of Zapolyarny displays rock samples obtained during the drilling operation"
Unrelated: what surprised me reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole was that a more recent borehole drilled 10 km (horizontally) within 36 days. That's over 10 meters an hour, kept going for over a month.
Repeatedly bouncing off the edges would probably slow the fall, and make it significantly more painful. That is, if the hole were wide enough to fit you.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kola-superdeep-borehole
as a source of more information.