Going deep: Excavation, collaboration and imagination at the Kola Superdeep Borehole

Abstract

On the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic lies an innocuous iron disc about the size of a dinner plate. If one were to prise this disc open, they would find the remains of the world’s deepest vertical hole. Reaching a depth of over 12 kilometres, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled in the pursuit of excavating scientific knowledges for a better understanding of the Earth’s crust. Whilst the borehole produced some important findings, and hosted an international delegation of researchers, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into disrepair. Since its closure, the Kola Superdeep has become lost to history, but its existence as a ruin has generated new artistic engagements with the underground. This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird. By resisting the notion that the subterranean can be objectively known through science, I reveal how the Kola Superdeep produces other relations, knowledges, and ways of sensing the subterranean.

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…Rather than speaking abstractly of geology, materiality, or (vertical/voluminous) dimensionality as such, some scholars have sought to dislodge and theorize a particular quality they find in subsurface relations which could help understand sociality or knowledge in a more expansive way. Texture (Ballestero 2019), permeability (Bosworth, 2017), strata and stratification (Clark, 2017;Yusoff, 2017), inscrutability (Kroepsch and Clifford, 2022), discontinuity (Wrigley, 2023), and depletion (Bessire, 2022) are efforts to theorize a concept emerging from examining the subsurface to help understand the social. One is reminded that a concept as seemingly ubiquitous as "social formation" might have been initially theorized by Marx from that of "geological formation" (Leslie, 2006: 74).…”