The deepest borehole ever drilled (on mainland)
There is a book, a wonderful book, that I warmly recommend you, it's A short history of (nearly) everything by Bill Bryson . It's one of the best book on science I have ever read! Written by a journalist, who at a certain point in his life, decided to learn more about our planet and about about science in general and full of anecdotes. Today I want to tell you about the deepest borehole, one of the stories Bill Bryson tells in his book. By the 1960s scientists had grown sufficiently frustrated by how little they understood of the Earth’s interior that they decided to try to do something about it. Specifically, they got the idea to drill through the ocean floor (the continental crust was too thick) to the Moho discontinuity and to extract a piece of the Earth’s mantle for examination at leisure. The thinking was that if they could understand the nature of the rocks inside the Earth, they might begin to understand how they interacted, and thus possibly be able to predict...