Soviet miners drilled a hole so deep they reached Hell.
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
0 sources for · 3 against
AS REPORTEDno primary record reached; this is what the reporting says
Fact-checkers and reference sources report that the claim of Soviet miners drilling a hole to Hell is a well-known urban legend and hoax, rather than a factual event.
# Did Soviet miners drill a hole to Hell?
Tags: religion
- Score: 10
- Views: 1504
- Answers: 1
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: user17906 (103 rep)
- Asked: 2014-03-02
- Site: skeptics
## Question
This was claimed (though referred to as a hoax by one of the characters) in a recent XKCD comic:
http://www.xkcd.com/1330/
Did Soviet miners drill a hole to super-hot cavern where you could hear screaming?
## Answers
### Answer by user5341 (score: 14 [ACCEPTED])
No.
This was, indeed, a hoax.
The real drilling was Kola Superdeep Borehole.
They didn't encounter any super-hot caverns (though the temperature reached a much higher than predicted 180 degrees C). There's no record of it ever being super-hot (the hoax claimed thousands of degrees) or emitting tortured screams.
The hoax itself was well debunked, both on Snopes as well as Wikipedia.
The documentation included tracing first mentions of the story that were traced:
he story was reported to first have been published in 1990 by a Finnish newspaper 'Ammennusastia', a journal published by a group of Christians from Leväsjoki, a village in the municipality of Siikainen in Western Finland.
The story eventually made its way to the Am
The deepest hole we have ever dug
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# The deepest hole we have ever dug
6 May 2019
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Mark Piesing
Getty Images
During the Cold War, the US and Soviets both created ambitious projects to drill deeper than ever before.
The lakes, forests, mists and snow of the Kola Peninsula, deep in the Arctic Circle, can make this corner of Russia seem like a scene from a fairy tale. Yet amidst the natural beauty stand the ruins of an abandoned Soviet scientific research station. In the middle of the crumbling building is a heavy, rusty metal cap embedded in the concrete floor, secured by a ring of thick and equally rusty metal bolts.
According to some, this is the entrance to hell.
This is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth. The 40,230ft-deep (12.2km) construction is so deep that locals swear you can hear the screams of souls tortured in hell. It took the Soviets almost 20 years to drill this far, but the drill bit was still only about one-third of the way through the
How Deep Is the Deepest Hole in the World? | Scientific American
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February 22, 2020
4 min read
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# How Deep Is the Deepest Hole in the World?
There’s a portal to the center of the earth in the wreckage of an abandoned project site in Murmansk, Russia. What’s it for? And why is the Internet Googling “Kola Superdeep Borehole screams?”
By Everyday Einstein Sabrina Stierwalt
A portal to the center of the earth sits among the ruins of an aban
Everything we examined (3)
This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.