Walking along the dirt road, Roman remarked that we should soon see the yellow tower, the iconic marker of the geophysical laboratory and science research station. Up until this point, we had witnessed endless hills of nikel, mud, and red soil converging on the northern tundra, stretching hori-zontality out of my field of view.

The light was diffused on the skyline, making it difficult to decipher between soviet scientific architecture and debris from the war. The weather was overcast but settled. We had neither to fear fatiguing heat nor drenching rain. In fact, the only thing looming was nightfall.

Carrying omni-tools and a dated map, we persevered. “Af-ter all,” I said to myself, “what do we risk? Simply to take a journey through a desolate landscape of rocks, to climb a remarkable mountain, to cross a fragrant marsh, and if the worst comes to worst, to descend an endless vertical column into an unknown mirror that might just be illuminating.” I was engaged in neutrality and apathetic towards my own con-ditions of existence. We were venturing to the deepest point on earth.

The three of us took to navigating between marshland and shallow bodies of water on all sides of the station. The liquid plains made it difficult to walk. The station, isolated as a closed system of scientific technological development, is still linked by large networks of borderless infrastructure. This is the site where the journey to the super deep began. Led by the

USSR’s Interdepartmental Scientific Council for the Study of the Earth’s Interior and Superdeep Drilling, research com-menced in 1962 to descend into an unparalleled abyss. Previ-ously, geologists could only theorize about the composition of the earth’s crust, but with the super deep borehole, they pierced the Earth’s upper crust and sampled the warm, mys-terious area between it and the mantle- known as the Mohor-ovičić discontinuity. It remains the most extreme puncture on the planet.

The road smelled of moss and lichen, especially during certain periods when there was an utter cessation of wind. It was without wind when a silence deeper, more terrible than the silence of the desert would fall upon this expedition—and seemed to hang like a leaden weight upon marshlands of sea-weed. I sought, amid the stillness, to penetrate through the distant fog, to tear down the veil that concealed the mysteri-ous distance and depths below us. No sooner had this thought appeared than its image dissolved, and the remnants of a gi-gantic fragmented machinic corps rose on the horizon, glori-ous and counter-spectacle.

I decided to linger behind the other two in a transfixed state. A set of wires ran alongside me, and soon interrupting radio waves emanated from a secret radar nearby, on the ter-ritory of another other country. In a cold war trope, the secret radar announced thoughts from the future and led me into a darkened space.

NOTES FROM THE SUPERDEEPAN EXPEDITION TO BE PERFORMED

VOL I.

It was a control room with screens and trashbins filled with desktop images and scrapped gif bits left for us to decipher.

To the right of it, a medical laboratory room where dead components would be brought to undergo physical examina-tions. X-rays were taken of broken body parts of machines, dislocated joints and tendons were reset, and erotic care of-fered for melted metal. It was an exchange service of allianc-es, affinities, and co-evolutionary possibilities between the body and technology. All instruments now left untouched and disinfectant bottles sealed except for a small one lying on the floor that I accidently kicked into the hallway.

A liquid drop of silver fell from the roof.

The next door was a vast library of pressed microscopic fossils perfectly preserved in stone books lining the walls, and the remains of twenty-four species of single-cell marine plants, otherwise known as plankton, from two billion years ago.

Nikolay’s voice came on the radiocom, and I fol-lowed his instructions to the drill laboratory site in the main building. There on a flickering monitor was N.S. Timofeev, doctor in technical science and chair-man of the Interdepartmental Scientific Council:

“Here at the lab resides a unique drilling appa-ratus. Most deep-drilling rigs have used a rotating shaft to bore through the ground, and also a series of extensions that are incrementally added as the hole grows deeper, but such a method was unwork-able with a hole as deep as the Kola. To overcome this, we devised a solution where only the drill bit at the end of the shaft was rotated. We accomplished this by forcing the pressurized “drilling clay”- the lubricant pumped down the drill shaft- through a specially designed drill bit to cause it to spin. At the deepest point though, because of great porosity and permeability combined with high temperatures, the rock began to behave more like a plastic than a solid and made drilling hot as hell and nearly impossi-ble.”

Beside the monitor a thermometer reads + 180 °C.

Still orbiting our destination, we know the hole is mathematically located beneath the vertical iconic tower, although now demolished. We move to stand over it. It is this hollow borehole that transcends all surface prospects previously carved out on our perfo-rated planet, as it embodies digging regimes, xenoar-cheology, deep-time, radical geodata, and layers of cultural substratum and history. We are staring into the monolith and listening to the ungrounding process in itself- a tombspace of earth collapsing in singular-ity. Moving closer with my ear I try to understand the relation of traumas, wounds on earth and resoluteness of politics, territory and knowledge.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. While the past’s failed utopian aspirations demon-strate what could have been, they also reveal what could still become. All total awareness is communi-cated from the depths of an inverted black obelisk.

Time passes and after an hour or more in silent contemplation of the journey, we rise and go down towards the bank on our way of return. After a slight repast, we seek refuge in slumber, and at length, im-pressions burn the brain and sleep comes over my weary eyes.

Technological control room for monitoring boreholes, including the SG-3. Photo cred: The Superdeep Well of the Kola Peninsula

Main drill rigs. Photo cred: Roman Xoroshilov

Detail of handmade Depeche Mode posters in mens lockeroom. Photo cred: Roman Xoroshilov

“It was a time when humans had the idea to study the Earth crust. There are millions of ways of how to study it. The Americans decided to study it through the surface of the ocean because they had a hypothesis that underwater the crust is thinner, which would have made it easier to drill through it and reach the Earth mantle, on which the crust is laid and where the magma is. And you know, magma is the source of energy and of all the fields. Our country, the USSR, had the same goal. Back then there were two major countries that were competing with each other- the USA and the USSR. So our geologists decided there was no need for us to drill through the ocean bottom because the surface of the coun-try is very diverse. So they programmed 11 deep drill wells - from Kamchatka to Ukraine- and some of them were sup-posed to be particularly deep. There they wanted to drill the deepest part of the crust, which is laid upon crystal shields. There were three of these shields within the territory of the USSR – the Ukrainian shield, the Aldan shield and the Baltic shield. These shields are part of a crust that has been rising for billions of years. Slowly weathering erodes them down, and therefore, we can reach the deepest part of the well log. This means we don’t have to climb all the way up Everest- we can drill right here. There was a special department that was in charge of this, headed by the Academic Smirnov. Yes, he had the same last name as me. So they picked this location (the Kola Peninsula) for drilling in order to contribute to the

process of building the Pechenskoye ore fields and thus help the state integrated a plant that needed resources. Previous to that, the plant hadn’t had a strategic plan or ability to drill that deep. For example, they would be drilling hundreds of running meters, but insisted on not drilling 30-50 meters ex-tra to reach a rich crossing. Only 30 meters, can you imag-ine?! On the one hand, it could have been a way of saving re-sources for them, perhaps. On the other, it could also be that they were not skilled enough, so to speak. So when we started to drill in the 1970’s, less than in a year at the interval of 1540 – 1810 we had crossed a few ore bodies that contained industrial nickel as well. So in a way it was sort of our gift to them, to the plant. And then what happens – instead of being thankful they cannot event greet us on the Geologist day or Drilling day, they didn’t even send a card or anything. And they were communists back then – and now look what hap-pens. Real werewolves! When they closed our well in 2005 and I was laid off, the plant gave the whole estate, all housing and the administrative building, to the city. There were about 1000 rooms like mine, where we are now, in total. But when I asked them to allocate 3 or 4 rooms for a Superdeep borehole museum, they wouldn’t let this happen. So I said: ‘To hell with you, I will be saving money from my pension and will open the museum, which will belong to the state, not to the plant!’ Unsurprisingly, they said they wouldn’t give me the collection. I am still working on this. ”

EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH YURIG SMIRNOVHydro and engineering geologist for the Kola Super Deep BoreholeZapolyarny Russia, 2014Translated by Maria Veits

Yurig Smirnov demonstrating the size of the Kola Super deep borehole at his home in Zapolyarny, Russia, 2013

Below: core samples from a depth of 12,262 metres underground from the SG-3