Drill tower of the main borehole at Bortum-Erbendorf. Image credit: W.J.Pilsak/wikimedia commons When it comes to understanding the Earth's geology, many researchers are just scratching the surface. Literally. With drills and picks and axes. But in Germany, a decades-old drilling site lets scientists (and one Dutch artist) go much deeper---nearly 6 miles below the surface. And they've brought up a guttural voice from deep inside the Earth. Drilling of the KTB borehole began in the late 1980s in a region of southern Germany called the Zone von Erbendorf-Vohenstrauß---the line where two ancient landmasses once merged to become the supercontinent Pangaea. The geology was bound to be interesting here, but even geologists were surprised by what they saw.
As described in Gizmodo, scientists discovered
shifting seismic plates, boiling hydrogen, and temperatures reaching 600 degrees Fahrenheit....The deep-drilling experiment yielded huge surprises about the structure of the earth, including maps of rock temperature, ...
