page_title: Scientific drilling
section_title: Deepest drillings
hierarchical_section_title: Scientific drilling / Deepest drillings
caption_attribution_description: English: Riserless and mudlift drilling.
context_page_description: Scientific drilling into the Earth is a way for scientists to probe the Earth's sediments, crust, and upper mantle. In addition to rock samples, drilling technology can unearth samples of connate fluids and of the subsurface biosphere, mostly microbial life, preserved in drilled samples. Most of the technology used for drilling come from advances in the oil and gas industry. Scientific drilling is carried out on land by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and at sea by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. Scientific drilling on the continents includes drilling down into solid ground as well as drilling from small boats on lakes. Sampling thick glaciers and ice sheets to obtain ice cores is related but will not be described further here.
  Like probes sent into outer space, scientific drilling is a technology used to obtain samples from places that people cannot reach. Human beings have descended as deep as 2,212 m in Veryovkina Cave, the world's deepest known cave, located in the Caucasus mountains of the country of Georgia.
context_section_description: The Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola peninsula of Russia reached 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) and is the deepest penetration of the Earth's solid surface.  The German Continental Deep Drilling Program at 9.1 kilometres (5.7 mi) has shown the earth crust to be mostly porous. Drillings as deep as 2.1 kilometres (1.3 mi) into the seafloor were achieved at DSDP/ODP/IODP Hole 504B. Because the continental crust is about 45 km thick on average, whereas oceanic crust is 6–7 km thick, deep drillings have penetrated only the upper 25-30% of both crusts.
caption: Riserless and mudlift drilling
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