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  • halamadrid · 5 days ago

    What are all those oops for?

      • bastawhiz · 5 days ago

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

      • eastbound · 5 days ago

        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

      • Avicebron · 5 days ago

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

        • lambdaone · 5 days ago

          I had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.

          • jadbox · 5 days ago

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

            • lambdaone · 5 days ago

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

              • ks2048 · 5 days ago

                Site down?

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

                  • aw1621107 · 5 days ago

                    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.

                • AviationAtom · 5 days ago

                  Y'all done hugged it to death

                  • B1FF_PSUVM · 5 days ago

                    It was erroring out 12h ago.

                • WithinReason · 5 days 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.

                  • neilv · 5 days ago

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

                        • rationalist · 5 days ago

                          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 :-)

                          • Suppafly · 3 days ago

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

                          • tialaramex · 4 days ago

                            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"

                            • geor9e · 4 days ago

                              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.)

                              • tialaramex · 4 days ago

                                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.

                            • dvh · 5 days ago

                              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."

                              • pchristensen · 5 days ago

                                I'm excited for them too!

                                • sph · 5 days ago

                                  Haha I definitely googled that, and I was not disappointed

                                    • rus20376 · 4 days ago

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

                                      • throw-the-towel · 4 days ago

                                        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.

                                    • underlipton · 5 days ago

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

                                      • js2 · 4 days ago

                                        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?

                                        • thunderbong · 4 days ago

                                          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.

                                          • saretup · 4 days ago

                                            Looks pretty blurred

                                            • nosrepa · 4 days ago

                                              Long pressing the image shows the title text.

                                            • sheepybloke · 4 days ago

                                              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!

                                              • ozyschmozy · 4 days ago

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

                                                • xg15 · 4 days ago

                                                  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...

                                                  • Suppafly · 3 days ago

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