Yes, holes. I’m not talking about the kind people fuck, but I guess if you’re bold enough, you could give it a go. No, I’m talking this time, on the deepest reaches of our planet. Places that go so far down, you would, lacking scientific instruments, just be like, "damn." While obviously, digging pits, burrows, and holes has long been a practical necessity in our existence as a species, some people went way nuts with this, and also, Mother Nature has, er, "blessed" us humans with some perplexing depths as well—some which can even seem unnatural, despite being the craft of natural forces.
Ever dug a hole? I know I have, and it’s hard work, but my parents were just happy I wasn’t playing Double Dragon and was doing something active. That said, I had to fill that 5-foot-deep hole in again when they decided that my playing Double Dragon was less of an inconvenience to the backyard. But some of these deep spots would take me a thousand lifetimes to recreate.
Now, figuring out measures of depth requires a baseline. When we talk height, we use Mount Everest as that baseline. Tallest mountain in the world and all that shit, at 5.5 miles high. But what about the lowest? People say it’s the Mariana Trench—a vast oceanic feature in the western Pacific Ocean. It’s close enough to Japan that you could probably get sushi delivered, but they’d have to have a delivery vehicle capable of going 7 miles underwater and withstanding 1,000 atmospheres of pressure, which, if you can’t fathom (har har) how much pressure that exactly is, well, it’s 1,000 times the pressure of just standing around on dry land, so it would squish you like a tomato full of intestines if you were suddenly transported there. If you find a genie, do not wish to go down there. Also, I will not be covering stuff underwater. I am discussing things you could hypothetically go visit without a special submarine.
Let’s do our deep dive. Not ranked in any particular order.
Veryovkina Cave
Discovered in 1968 in Georgia (no, not the one with the peaches, the Slavic nation), Veryovkina Cave is an astounding 1.2 miles deep and exists high into the Caucasus mountains. Some intrepid Russians went down there shortly after it was found. How do you not notice a giant cave in your country, anyhow? The Russians made it to the bottom only as recently as 2018. The Georgians were apparently like, "fuck that, we’ll let the neighbors go down there first and get back to us."
The cave was formed over millions of years by glacial erosion and has brought very daring people from all over the world who wish to plumb its depths. One of them, a man named Sergei Koneev, went to tackle it himself in 2020, got stuck, and died of hypothermia, as the average temperature down there is near freezing.
Mponeng Gold Mine
Located in scenic South Africa, the Mponeng Gold Mine is 2.5 miles below sea level, making it the world’s deepest mine. It used to go by the charming name of "Western Deep Levels No. 1 Shaft." Shaft! Can ya dig it?
Since operations began in 1986, it has produced substantial levels of gold, with over 8.5 tons of gold mined in 2023, the last year we have data for alone. It’s still in operation and has no plans on giving up until 2029, as there was an estimated 1,300 tons of gold in there when they started, and they’re gonna take every last bit of it.
Unlike Veryovkina Cave, this one gets ridiculously hot, with miners having to suffer through temperatures up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. They were kinda pissed off about that and went on strike because fuck that noise. Eventually, they started pumping an ice slurry to cool it down to a mere 86 degrees and sealing off excavated areas with concrete to help insulate it better. Some 5,400 tons of rock are removed every damn day. Can you imagine? "Time to go to work," then travel 2.5 miles down a hot mineshaft, and start hitting rocks with a hammer? Hard pass.
Chand Baori
In the heart of India’s state of Rajasthan, there is a curious place called Chand Baori. I am...pretty sure...it’s pronounced the way it is spelled. While it might not be one of the absolutely deepest places on Earth, it has a very unique quality: it is the world’s deepest stepwell. What is a stepwell? It’s a place carved into Earth and stone, in this case, completely by hand in the 8th century and probably well into the 9th. It is a series of stairwells sculpted from solid rock and leading down, way down, to water. It was built so that people might take a fucking slog down all these fucking steps to get a bucket of water to make some rice or something. How deep is it? Only some 100 feet deep, but that’s 13 stories, or 3500 steps, to go from top to bottom, then back again with a full bucket of water.
It’s on here because it gets points for design. "How many steps?" "ALL OF THEM!"—a square block hewn out of the ground and covered on all sides by stairs and stairs and, oh! More stairs! You’d think they’d have put a bucket on a rope and hoist or something, but I could not find any records of them having done so. Bummer.
Denman Glacier
I said I wasn’t gonna do things undersea, but this is kind of a weird in-between. The Denman Glacier is the deepest non-underwater place on Earth, but they sorta cheated on this one. It is the deepest natural location on land not covered by liquid water. It’s a fucking glacier. The concept of it not being under liquid water seems like a dodge or hustle. Nevertheless, it is some 2.25 miles deep. It’s in Antarctica, which should surprise nobody, and while discovered in 1912, not a soul had figured out what the fuck it was about, until a research project, sadly named the "Bed Machine Antarctica Project," run by the University of California, Irvine, decided to map it all out in 2020.
Bed Machine sounds like those "magic fingers" in motel rooms from the past, where they had a box that looked like a parking meter on your bed but, for a quarter, would vibrate the bed like one of those plastic kiddie horse rides in the parking lots of grocery stores. The downside is that the room itself would give you herpes just by opening the door to it.
Kola Superdeep Borehole
The Cold War was a really weird time. The USA and the Soviet Union constantly tried to flex on one another with various achievements. Never mind the nuclear arms race or the space race, there was another race going on, too: The Race to Do Stupid Shit. In essence, both countries would pick some dumbshit project to undertake and then be like, "YEAH, WE SHOWED YOU FUCKERS!" The USA notoriously tried to do jetpacks and human-mounted backpack helicopters. The Soviets, however, were like, "We’re going to dig a really deep hole, and go fuck yourselves." Which they did, for...reasons? The Kola Superdeep Borehole project was started in 1970, using drilling equipment normally reserved for oil rigs and the like.
Allegedly, not just "drilling a deep hole for the fuck of it," the project continued until 1989, reaching an astonishing 7.75 miles in depth. It was supposed to be for very dubious scientific purposes, but once they got so deep, the drills started melting.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, nobody really had an interest in digging the hole any further, as the requirements to continue the project left the new Russian government saying, "Wait. Why we dig hole? What does hole do, Dmitri?" "Eh, hole exists to be hole, but best, most deep hole!" "No more hole," and so it was sealed up and not thought of again. The hole itself, while nearly 8 miles deep, is only 9 inches wide. You can even visit it if you’re in the mood to go to the middle of West Bumblefuck, Russia, and bring a very large wrench with which to undo the seal. Then, you could hock the most epic of loogies, which, given physics, would take roughly a whole minute to get to the bottom, assuming a straight trajectory and good phlegm.
Ya Mama Pussy
It’s so deep...they don’t have scientific instruments to measure it.
All joking aside, these things exist and are real places one could visit. Not sure how easy it is to go to Antarctica, but if you do, leave your Hawaiian shirts at home.
Stay safe, and don’t go too deep.
-Wombstretcha
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is a step climber, guy who pees on glaciers, not bored borehole enthusiast, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, OR. He can found at his website, Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter/X/whatever as @wombstretcha503, and on MeWe and (begrudgingly) Facebook as "Wombstretcha the Magnificent."
