Holes | Hacker News Reader

Holes

xkcd.com

Hover 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."

I'm excited for them too!

Haha I definitely googled that, and I was not disappointed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals

Forget about that, I just learned there’s a salt mine under Detroit!

There'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.

The story of the hand-dug well: https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/places/utilities/woodin...

Explain xkcd has links to the Wikipedia articles for each hole.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3266:_Holes

Site down?

The Wikipedia page on borehole doesn’t mention Deep Water Horizon at all.

And Wikipedia says this one is over 12,000m deep,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Shaheen_Oil_Field

The >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.

Y'all done hugged it to death

It was erroring out 12h ago.

Lake Baikal sediment layer almost as deep as the Mariana Trench:

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.

Oh right. Basically China has its own tectonic plate, with Baikal on the rift, top left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amur_plate I did not know that.

You may enjoy the new global tectonic map with 11000 features and 1180 "tectonic plates". https://doi.org/10.1111/ter.12662, also available on Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1dXnQlelic4WjA4xKnY...

I forget how cool Lake Baikal is until it shows up randomly and I'm reminded to go look it up again.

What are all those oops for?

collapses and floods it looks like. Here's the oops for the Pantai Remis mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA

Wow, that's pretty "oops" if I ever saw it!

Lake 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

I had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.

Did you not scroll over to see the even more massive Kola Superdeep Borehole?

Yes, but there aren't any people in that one.

> 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...

Mponeng is a massive continuously commercially operating mine with 5k workers

You cannot convince me that something ridiculous wasn't covered up wrt Deepwater Horizon.

Was 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...

It'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!

Funny that he misspelled one (derinku_y_u, literally meaning deep well), given all the effort that clearly went into it.

Man that South African gold mine could have dug a whole lot less if they started at sea level.

What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?

conveniently there is a xkcd for that too https://xkcd.com/1330/

There's a documentary about that, in the form of the game 'Motherload'

https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload

I 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 :-)

I used to play that at work, I thought it went away when all the other flash games went away.

Nothing 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"

They 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.)

Also in both cases economic reasons. BP drilled to reach oil which makes economic sense, but AIUI the Russians wanted to keep drilling but eventually central government wouldn't give them any more money.

But yes, largely a coincidence. I think humans would see the same "pattern" if it were slightly more than 12km. We like patterns, we're the superstitious pigeon experiment but at a ludicrous scale. I would like to think the patterns I've seen point at some underlying more important truth - but the pigeon thought so too.

Hell: https://xkcd.com/1330/

XKCD always has a mobile version. You need add a m. prefix -

https://m.xkcd.com/3266/

Helps to see the alt-text if you're on a phone.

Looks pretty blurred

Long pressing the image shows the title text.

Can we update the link to 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?

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