World’s deepest hole had to be closed up for unsettling reason

The deepest hole in the world had to be closed up, and for a rather unsettling reason.

We are talking here about the deepest artificial hole, which stretched a phenomenal distance into the Earth's crust.

You might be visualising an enormous and cavernous space here, but that is not how this hole looks.

If anything the reality is actually somehow more disturbing, with the hole being bored a whopping 40,230ft into the Earth's crust.

That's around 12.2km, or just under 7.6 miles into the Earth.

The hole is located in Russia. (maps4media / Contributor / Getty)

Despite its truly immense depth, the hole is about the same width as a dinner plate, and is now covered over.

Something about a tiny hole stretching that deep into the Earth is really rather scary.

You can almost imagine some immense ghoulish hand reaching out of it to drag in bystanders. Sleep well!

Indeed, people who live near to the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia's Kola Peninsula have even claimed that the hole has made hear the screams of people being tortured in hell.

But why on Earth would you try to bore such a deep hole into the Earth? Could it be mining? Possibly oil exploration?

In fact neither of these is true. It was actually part of the races in the Cold War.

While the Space Race is the most well-known, there was also one to investigate deeper into the the Earth.

Yes, different countries competed to see who could dig the deepest hole.

This is the hole now, covered by a metal plate. (Rakot13/WikiCommons)

Uli Harms works for the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and worked on the German counterpart to the Soviet hole.

He told the BBC: “It was in the time of the Iron Curtain when the drilling was started.

“And there was certainly competition between us. One of the main motivations was that the Russians were simply not really open with their data."

He added: "When the Russians started to drill they claimed they had found free water - and that was simply not believed by most scientists.

"There used to be common understanding among Western scientists that the crust was so dense 5km down that water could not permeate through it.”

But why did they stop drilling?

Well, despite the hole's immense depth they still only made it around one third of the way through the Earth's crust.

As you get deeper and closer to the molten mantle, things heat up.

At the bottom of the hole temperatures got to a pretty toasty 180C (356F), which was too hot to continue.

Perhaps there's some truth to those stories about it being a gate to hell.