Kola: The World’s Deepest Hole

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here too, and Jerry's here too.
Because this one's so exciting, Jerry said, I wouldn't miss this one for the world. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck** (0:22)
Unless I had some minor appointment or meeting that I could easily move.

**Josh** (0:27)
It's so great that Jerry just doesn't talk on this because we can say whatever we want, and we can't hear what she's saying in response.

**Chuck** (0:35)
Yeah, it would be fun as if we were doing our fun poking at Jerry sometimes, when she just cut in and said, go f*** yourself, guys.

**Josh** (0:43)
Right. I mean, I'm sure that's what she's thinking.

**Chuck** (0:46)
Maybe we can beat that out. That'd be fun.

**Josh** (0:48)
We'll see.
But yes, she's excited about this one, and she even said, it's not going to be boring, or is it? And we said, Jerry, pipe down.

**Chuck** (1:00)
Boring. Wasn't that a Simpsons saying? Boring.

**Josh** (1:06)
I don't know. It sounds like Reverend Lovejoy. Yeah.

**Chuck** (1:08)
I feel like Reverend Lovejoy did that in a sermon one time that led them into a flashback or something. It's a very distant memory.

**Josh** (1:17)
It sounds like you're talking about the Mr. Sparkle episode where Marge becomes the listen lady at church, and Reverend Lovejoy's completely lost his, I guess, pastoral sense. And the flashback you're talking about is when he traces it back to the first time he met Ned Flanders who came to him for advice because he'd just done the bump and his rear end touched the rear end of another young man and he was up in arms about it.

**Chuck** (1:47)
Maybe he was saying boring because it was a Ned Flanders flashback.

**Josh** (1:49)
It's possible.

**Chuck** (1:50)
Somebody will know this one. I'm pretty sure it was Lovejoy though.

**Josh** (1:55)
Okay. At any rate. Yeah. We should have said that in unison.

**Chuck** (1:59)
That would have been great.

**Josh** (2:01)
We're talking today not about The Simpsons, although we just have and that's great. We're talking today about a different kind of Cold War race between the USSR and the United States.

**Chuck** (2:14)
Got a lot less press.

**Josh** (2:15)
Way less press. It got a lot less money and funding and attention and technology and engineers and brains thrown at it. But I also wonder, Chuck, if we downplay it because the USSR beat us so soundly at this particular race.

**Chuck** (2:34)
Maybe. Yeah, that's possible because of course, we're not talking about going to outer space. We're talking about boring deep into the earth and digging a deep hole. We're going to talk about that now in the form of the Cola Borehole, K-O-L-A.
This started in the 1960s, yes?

**Josh** (2:54)
Well, yes. I think the idea started in the 60s, but they started drilling in 1970 But let's not get ahead of ourselves because the Soviets were actually following the American lead. America made the first shot over the Soviet's bow by drilling into the earth first. Yeah, there you go.
They undermined the Soviet morale by doing this.

**Chuck** (3:21)
That's right. In 1958, we launched something called Project Mohol.
And this was like, hey, let's dig down to the mantle. Let's get a sample off of Guadalupe Island. Like, let's go through the ocean floor because the ocean is already deep. So let's just go ahead and start down there. And the name Project Mohol is a bit of a sciency nerdy joke that plays on the moho discontinuity, or discontinuity. How would you say it?

**Josh** (3:51)
The second one.

**Chuck** (3:52)
Second one. And that is the moho discontinuity is the region where the crust and the mantle meet up and say hello.

**Josh** (4:01)
Right. And they were, I mean, this is theoretical. We should say it's named after a guy named A.
I think it's Mohorovičić of Croatia. Yeah. Who back in 1909, 1909, mind you, was studying seismic waves from earthquakes so closely that he realized that at some point in the Earth's crust, they actually like speed up. They hit some literal inflection point. And he was like, there's some sort of boundary there, maybe even a discontinuity, as Chuck will later say.
And he, well, it became, I don't think he named it after himself, but it became called the Moho discontinuity, like you said. It was hypothetical, it was theoretical, but one reason they named it that is because ultimately the goal was to drill right through the crust into the mantle. That's the money lithosphere.