Give Russians this, their public works projects are nothing short of spectacular. And sometimes worthy of mad science, as the Kola Superdeep Borehole attests to. This hole goes 7 miles into the earth, a fifth of a mile deeper than the bottom of the ocean. Started in the seventies, Soviet scientists continued working on the project until the 1994, when the bottom of the hole reached temperatures of 356 degrees F.
Luckily, the efforts weren’t a waste. The Ruskies found fossils, and even water, down in the sweltering bottom. Hank Green can fill you in on the rest.