The Kola Superdeep Borehole

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1980s, a team of Soviet scientists dug a hole in the Earth’s crust so deep that they reached Hell… complete with high temperatures, unexplained happenings, and even the tortured screams of damned souls. At least, that’s what a popular urban legend at the time claimed. Dylan and producer Amanda McGowan explore the origins of this legend – and the real-life scientific quest that inspired it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, Amanda. How are you doing?
0:01.9	Hey, Dylan. I'm good. How are you?
0:04.3	I'm good. I'm just, like, hanging out, being cozy. I really like this time of year.
0:08.5	Yeah. And speaking of being warm and cozy, I'm pretty sure we're talking about hell today, right?
0:12.2	Yeah, yeah. We, the warmest, coziest place of them all. Hell.
0:18.0	And in particular, I wanted to take us back to the 1980s.
0:22.0	When this story starts circulating on TV, on radio, and print, it's about this team of scientists that had discovered hell was real.
0:32.6	And, in fact, they had proof.
0:35.8	That's a pretty irresistible claim.
0:38.2	So, yeah, I would like to see proof.
0:40.1	Yeah.
0:40.2	The year is 1989.
0:43.0	You're at home.
0:44.2	You're flipping through TV.
0:46.7	And a station comes on called the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
0:51.9	Okay.
0:52.5	And they're running this, like, a news story.
0:55.1	They say in the Soviet Union, there was a team of geologists, engineers digging the deepest
1:01.4	hole ever known to man, deepest hole ever dug.
1:05.6	And the reporter goes on to say that the deeper they went, the weirder things started
1:10.5	to get. The temperature got
1:12.2	much hotter than they expected, hotter and hotter. And deep down there, around, you know,
	...

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