During the space race, the US and the USSR were busy firing rockets into the sky. At the same time, out on Russia’s Kola Peninsula near the Norwegian border, Soviet engineers were doing something much stranger: drilling straight down. While their cosmonauts chased orbit, their geologists chased the centre of the Earth, and ended up with the deepest man-made hole in history, later sealed with what looks like an ordinary metal manhole cover in a scrap-strewn yard. That hole is the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It goes so far down that Mount Everest and Mount Fuji stacked on top of each other would still come up short, and yet, in planetary terms, it barely scratches the surface. So why did the Russians dig it, what did they find, and why did they finally give up and bolt it shut? The i

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