The Story of the Hell Hole

About 10 years ago a friend and I drove from the city of Kirkenes, in far northern Norway, to Murmansk, Russia, a slow-moving and winding two-lane drive of about 140 miles across a treeless, slate gray wasteland high above the Arctic Circle.

As we drove south from the border checkpoint at Borisoglebsky and dog-legged east through the town of Zapolyarny, my friend gestured toward the passenger window to point out some dilapidated, low-slung buildings amid the frozen drifts. “The deepest hole in the world is over there,” he declared.

What a childishly whimsical idea, I thought. It’s exactly the sort of thing I recall trying to do as a kid—the playground sandbox effort to dig to China.

Here in the far Northwestern reaches of Russia, we were surrounded by the secrets of the Cold War, from forbidden nuclear research cities, radioactive waste dumps, and defunct radar sites to disused atomic bomb testing ranges. During my years as a Russia-based newspaper writer, I’d often get detained or harassed by the secret services for reporting from such places. But the deepest hole on Earth? That was always something you could walk right up to. So my friend stopped the car and we did.

When my editor Kristen French came to me with the print issue theme of Stupid, the idea of writing about the Russian borehole spun through my mind. I went looking for experts on deep holes, and ran across Ulrich Harms, and was able to track somebody down who actually worked on the hole, Sergei Nestrenko, who is now in his 80s.

He was delighted to talk about the joy of digging the deepest hole on Earth. I admire the stubbornness of their effort. Over a period of 20-odd years, they tried and tried to break through to a depth of 15,000 meters. They couldn't quite get there, but they came close enough.

—Charles Digges, Nautilus contributor

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