4 ms·
Holes
- halamadrid 3mo agoWhat are all those oops for?
- Cycl0ps 3mo agocollapses and floods it looks like. Here's the oops for the Pantai Remis mine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA
- bastawhiz 3mo agoWow, that's pretty "oops" if I ever saw it!
- eastbound 3mo agoLake Peigneur was swallowed by a whirlpool like in an anime, in a sad drilling that took away entire boats. The salt geologic bubble under the lake can absorb gigantic volumes of water, and a drilling for the exploitation of petrol initiated the hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
- Avicebron 3mo agoI forget how cool Lake Baikal is until it shows up randomly and I'm reminded to go look it up again.
- lambdaone 3mo agoI had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.
- jadbox 3mo agoDid you not scroll over to see the even more massive Kola Superdeep Borehole?
- lambdaone 3mo agoYes, but there aren't any people in that one.
- troupo 3mo ago> even more massive Kola Superdeep Borehole? Kola Superdeep Borehole is not massive. It's a small cylindrical hole in the ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole#/media/File:%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0(%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B0),_%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B3%D1%83%D1%81%D1%82_2012.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole#/media... Mponeng is a massive continuously commercially operating mine with 5k workers
- cbarrick 3mo agoExplain xkcd has links to the Wikipedia articles for each hole. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3266:_Holes https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3266:_Holes
- ks2048 3mo agoSite down? The Wikipedia page on borehole doesn’t mention Deep Water Horizon at all.
- ks2048 3mo agoAnd Wikipedia says this one is over 12,000m deep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Shaheen_Oil_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Shaheen_Oil_Field
- aw1621107 3mo agoThe >12km number is length, not depth: > However, in May 2008, a new record for borehole length was established by the extended-reach drilling (ERD) well BD-04A, in the Al Shaheen oil field. It was drilled to 12,289 m (40,318 ft), with a record horizontal reach of 10,902 m (35,768 ft) in only 36 days.
- AviationAtom 3mo agoY'all done hugged it to death
- B1FF_PSUVM 3mo agoIt was erroring out 12h ago.
- WithinReason 3mo agoLake Baikal sediment layer almost as deep as the Mariana Trench: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal#Geography_and_hydrography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal#Geography_and_hydr... [...] and below this lies some 7 km (4.3 mi) of sediment, placing the rift floor some 8–11 km (5.0–6.8 mi) below the surface, the deepest continental rift on Earth.
- card_zero 3mo agoOh right. Basically China has its own tectonic plate, with Baikal on the rift, top left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amur_plate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amur_plate I did not know that.
- LeoWattenberg 3mo agoYou may enjoy the new global tectonic map with 11000 features and 1180 "tectonic plates". https://doi.org/10.1111/ter.12662 https://doi.org/10.1111/ter.12662, also available on Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1dXnQlelic4WjA4xKnYFL3F-0_BtzltY https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1dXnQlelic4WjA4xKnY...
- letmevoteplease 3mo agoThe story of the hand-dug well: https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/places/utilities/woodingdean-well/woodingdean-well https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/places/utilities/woodin...
- neilv 3mo agoWhat's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?
- zokier 3mo agoconveniently there is a xkcd for that too https://xkcd.com/1330/ https://xkcd.com/1330/
- rolfus 3mo agoThere's a documentary about that, in the form of the game 'Motherload' https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload
- rationalist 3mo agoI played that game way back when - I highly recommend it. Edit: thanks, that's an(other) hour of my life I'll never get back :-)
- Suppafly 3mo agoI used to play that at work, I thought it went away when all the other flash games went away.
- tialaramex 3mo agoNothing of great interest. That's a tiny scratch in the surface of the planet, less than 1% of the radius. On the other hand although we lack the technology you'd need to destroy the damp rock where we live, we only live on some dry-ish outside surface parts of the rock, and we could trash that part and drive ourselves extinct. "Oops"
- geor9e 3mo agoThey were asking why the two deepest holes, despite being nowhere near each other, dug decades apart, are 99.3% of 12km and 99.5% of 12km respectively. Was BP symbolically honoring the russian scientists? Does the earth have an extremely uniform material property that happens to be at a very round number of km? Just a complete coincidence all around? (I asked AI, and it says coincidence, since BP stopped drilling once they hit oil, and the russians stopped drilling once they hit some melty rock.)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tomlow 3mo ago[dead]
- dvh 3mo agoHover text is "If you're thinking 'Wait, a giant crystal cave in Mexico? What's that?' then I'm SO excited for the image search you're about to do."
- pchristensen 3mo agoI'm excited for them too!
- sph 3mo agoHaha I definitely googled that, and I was not disappointed
- basilikum 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals
- rus20376 3mo agoForget about that, I just learned there’s a salt mine under Detroit!
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoThere's also one under Yerevan, Arnenia. Funnily, the altitude differences in the city are so large that the bottom of the mine is still higher above sea level than the city center.
- underlipton 3mo agoYou cannot convince me that something ridiculous wasn't covered up wrt Deepwater Horizon.
- js2 3mo agoCan we update the link to https://xkcd.com/3266/ https://xkcd.com/3266/ Anyone who wants the large image can click/tap the image, but the revere is harder to do. In the other direction, Mt. Everest is 8,848.86 meters above sea level. I guess we don't include Lake Tahoe and/or Crater Lake because even though they're deep(ish), their bottoms are above way sea level?
- thunderbong 3mo agoXKCD always has a mobile version. You need add a m. prefix - https://m.xkcd.com/3266/ https://m.xkcd.com/3266/ Helps to see the alt-text if you're on a phone.
- sheepybloke 3mo agoIt's funny this came out today! Just at lunch we were googling the highest and lowest capitals of the world. Lowest is Baku in Azerbaijan, at -28m!
- ozyschmozy 3mo agoFunny that he misspelled one (derinku_y_u, literally meaning deep well), given all the effort that clearly went into it.
- xg15 3mo agoWas missing the Iranian nuclear sites and other underground bases in this. Also, I knew Baikal lake was deep, but not how deep its sediment layer is! That looks like something out of a Lovecraft story...
- Suppafly 3mo agoMan that South African gold mine could have dug a whole lot less if they started at sea level.