Today we talk about the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a 7.6-mile vertical shaft plunged into the Earth's crust that remains the deepest artificial point on our planet.

Drilling began in 1970 on Russia's icy Kola Peninsula as Soviet scientists set out to pierce through the Earth's continental crust toward the mantle. Over nearly two decades of grueling engineering, the main borehole reached an astonishing depth of 12,262 meters (40,230 feet)—deeper than the Mariana Trench. But as the drill bit ground deeper into the ancient granite, the subterranean world proved far stranger and hotter than anyone anticipated.

In this episode, we’re digging into the groundbreaking scientific discoveries and extreme physical barriers that finally brought the drill to a halt. We explore how researchers uncovered 2-billion-year-old microscopic plankton fossils miles underground, found hot mineralized water trapped where solid rock was supposed to be, and encountered temperatures soaring to 356°F (180°C) - causing the deep stone to behave like soft plastic that squeezed back into the hole.

Watch your footing and check your heat shielding - we’re descending seven miles straight down into the crust of the Earth.

Today we talk about the legendary Ghoul of Arabic folklore as if it were a speculative primate.

Today we talk about the Hadean eon, the fiery, hellish dawn of Earth's history when our planet was a chaotic crucible of molten rock and relentless cosmic bombardment.

Spanning from the formation of the solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago to 4.0 billion years ago, this eon - named after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld - was a time before stable continents, before an oxygenated atmosphere, and long before life took root. In this episode, we are traveling back to a nightmare world where Earth's surface was a churning sea of glowing magma, continuously reshaped by intense volcanism and swept by the scorching radiation of a young Sun.

We’re dissecting the cataclysmic events that forged our home world, including the colossal collision with a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia - an impact so violent it re-melted Earth's outer layers and blasted vast amounts of debris into orbit, which rapidly coalesced to form our Moon. We’ll explore how the planet gradually cooled over hundreds of millions of years, allowing the first solid crustal rocks to freeze out of the magma, torrential steam clouds to condense into primordial oceans, and the raw chemical ingredients of life to take shape under a thick, toxic sky.

Calibrate your heat shields and brace for impact - we’re stepping directly into the primordial inferno of Earth's origin story.