HOLE 5 MILE

LISTEN TO STRANGE
SOUNDS RECORDED IN A
HOLE 5 MILES DEEP
FOR MORE THAN 20 years, the world’s
deepest hole could be found on Russia’s
Kola peninsula, boring 40,000 feet down
into the Earth’s crust. In recent years,
though, the Kola Superdeep Borehole (yes,
that’s its actual name) has been dwarfed
by both a 40,318-foot oil rig in Qatar and
a 40,502-foot well off the Russian island
of Sakhalin, and you get the sense that the
race for deepest hole in the world is not
over yet.
Google any of these super deep boreholes
and you’ll see pictures of gaping, circular
voids leading thousands of feet down to a
pit of mysteries. A hole’s endless nature is
just the sort of thing that make a person
ponder existential questions like: What
does life actually mean? And can you
really get to China by digging? It also
brings to mind more practical inquires
such as: How far down could I go before
I’m totally incinerated? Or is this going to
cause an earthquake?
For Lotte Geeven, she’s always wondered
about one thing: “I’ve always been
curious about what kind of sound the
Earth would make,” she says. And in her
recent project, The Sound of the Earth,
the Netherlands-based artist actually
found out. Geeven partnered with
geologists and engineers to record the
sound of a 30,000-foot hole located in the
sloping hills of Windischeschenbach,
Germany, and turned it into a fascinating
art installation.
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>At its deepest point, the hole reaches a
scorching 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Geeven’s fascination with holes goes way
back, all the way to her childhood.
“Digging in the earth is in my nature, and
I spent a childhood building underground
tunnels, huts and trying to dig a hole to
China with my friends until we reached
the underground water and couldn’t go
further,” she recalls. “The mystery of
what is below our feet has always stuck
to me so I decided that now, being a
grown up, I’d give it another try.”
She began researching super deep holes
and stumbled across the famous Kola
borehole. It turned out that the Kola hole
closed down in 2005 and had been
partially filled with concrete, so she
continued her search until she found the
perfect hole in Germany. She contacted
the German Research Center for
Geosciences and inquired about their
hole.
"My question to them was of an
existential and poetic nature: 'What does
the earth sound like?' I do believe they
were a bit skeptical at first about my
presence.” she says. “The first answer I
got from one of the logging specialists of
GFZ was straightforward and slightly
disappointing: 'Lotte, it’s going to be
totally silent down there.'"
At its deepest point, the hole reaches a
scorching 500 degrees Fahrenheit, a
temperature at which normal electronics
melt like an ice cream cone in the
summer. "My first naïve thought of
lowering a normal microphone inside was
waived," she says. Instead they used
recordings from a geophone, a device that
measures ground movement, and an
ultrasonic sensor that measures
soundwaves outside the range of human
hearing. That data was then translated
into audio by specialized software.
The first time Geeven listened to the
sound with proper headphones, she
recalls feeling overwhelmed by what she
heard. "All the hair on my arm stood up
straight and if I hear it now again after
many times it still has the same effect on
me," she says. The sound was like
rumbling thunder, or the oncoming roar
of a tornado ripping through the sky. "I
later learned that blind people can 'hear'
thunderstorms because the low frequency
can be sensed in the body," she adds.
"Perhaps this is what is going on."
Geeven uses audio foam as a visual
representation of the recorded sounds.
It’s not clear exactly what you hear on
Geeven’s recording. She guesses it could
be something small like a data
transmission that is resonating, but she
can’t be sure. In a Heisenberg-ian twist, it
seems possible that some of the sounds
were created by the devices themselves.
"Exactly knowing what it is is not
important I believe," she says. "Mysteries
are important. They act as engines for
new thoughts and ideas."
Geeven translated her sounds into a
visual installation that echoes a field lab
setup. It’s visually modest with just a
Russian seismograph registers the sound
while connected to low frequency
speakers, a photograph of the team at the
hole and a curved audio foam under
glass. But her ambitions for the project
are far greater than that.
Eventually, she’d like to dig a super deep
hole in a public space of some as-of-yet
undecided metropolis to act as an acoustic
instrument for the sounds beneath our
feet. If that sounds ambitious—you’d be
right. "The costs for this are estimated
between one and five million euros by
engineers I approached," she says. "I am
still looking for a partner that can help to
realize this."