Chapter 160: Ten-thousand-meter Abyss
Crust Base 156.
This base, like the other bases, was surrounded by thick dust and toxic air.
At this moment, the ion excavation equipment had been working continuously for five days, and the excavation depth had reached 4800 meters.
Due to the increasing depth, its excavation speed could no longer maintain the initial 1000 meters per day. Correspondingly, the demand for drill pipe transportation and installation speed had also slowed down gradually.
This could probably be considered good news.
Excavation depth of 4800 meters meant that during these five days of excavation process, a total of 120 million kilowatt-hours of electricity had been consumed, and rock with a total volume of about 330,000 cubic meters and a total mass of about 730,000 tons had been turned into dust and toxic gas, discharged into the atmosphere, with most of it scattered within hundreds of square kilometers around the base.
At this moment, around the base, almost all the land was covered by a thick layer of dust. Whether wheels rolled over it or feet stepped on it, it would immediately stir up a layer of dust.
In the deepest places, the dust thickness was nearly one meter. Even in the edge areas, the dust was enough to completely cover the land, turning the entire world gray.
That was 730,000 tons of mass after all. On average, every square meter of this over 300 square kilometers of land could be evenly distributed with about 2 kilograms of dust.
But this was still just the beginning. In the subsequent stages, several times more toxic dust and gas would be emitted.
But at this moment, the land underfoot suddenly shook. The next moment, a streak of crimson color was mixed into the gray “giant dragon” that had been continuously jetting out from the deep well.
Its power was so strong that even the wind wall equipped with dozens of giant fans could not blow it away.
It rose abruptly, almost in an instant, snapping the special ropes drawn from those four cable-stayed bridges.
The excavation equipment, weighing tens of thousands of tons and 5000 meters long, plummeted with a crash, smashing heavily into the depths thousands of meters underground. This mixture of flame and smoke shot straight up hundreds of meters into the sky, forming a mushroom cloud shape.
People’s hearts sank instantly.
This ion excavation equipment, which had cost a fortune and countless efforts to manufacture, was now completely destroyed.
From the type of disaster, it seemed to be an explosion caused by internal energy overload?
But the specific reason for its destruction didn’t seem important. What mattered was that it was destroyed and had lost any value for maintenance or repair.
The engineers who had struggled here for months stared blankly at this scene, unable to recover for a long time. And in places out of sight, the impact caused by the sudden destruction of this equipment was still spreading.
Including supporting facilities, the total power of a crust base was about 1 GW, that is, consuming 1 million kilowatt-hours per hour.
Compared to the 18.5 TW total load of the global power grid, this seemed insignificant. But the sudden disappearance of this load end and the instant reduction in electricity consumption still triggered a series of ripples in the power grid.
At this moment, the power grid frequency surged sharply, and the generator rotors in some nuclear power plants and thermal power plants suddenly increased in speed.
The supercomputer in the global power grid dispatch center instantly detected these changes. Under the automated dispatch program, an instruction arrived at light speed to more than a dozen giant dams.
The roaring downstream water flow quickly disappeared, and the hydroelectric units that continuously generated electricity with the rapidly rotating water flow also stopped operating.
Thousands of high-power pumps installed in the downstream reservoir started operating simultaneously, pumping the water that had completed the power generation process from the downstream reservoir back to the upstream reservoir.
At the same time, multiple giant energy storage stations fully released their loads, greedily drawing energy from the power grid like old cattle drinking water, taking over the electricity consumption load that had disappeared due to the sudden offline of that giant ion excavation equipment.
Immediately after, the slower-adjusting thermal and nuclear units began to reduce output, slowly lowering the power grid frequency, allowing those pumped storage power stations and giant energy storage stations to withdraw after success.
Crust Base 156 was abandoned by people without hesitation.
As for the surrounding destroyed environment… we’ll talk about it later.
Doomsday Plan Command Center, among the 500 green dots on the global map, one had already turned red.
The next moment, another red appeared.
Sun Changhe glanced at it and saw it was Base 339.
“The failure is most likely due to excessive pressure in the midcourse geological strata, breaking through the vitrified well wall and argon gas pressure, causing the excavation equipment to be completely damaged…”
Sun Changhe nodded slightly.
He knew that as the excavation depth continued to increase, this situation would occur more and more frequently in the next period.
Ten days later, the excavation depth increased to 7000 meters, reaching the category of ultra-deep well in the traditional sense. And the ion excavation equipment still working numbered 409 units.
At a depth of 7000 meters underground, even in a deep well with only atmospheric pressure and no rock pressure, the gas pressure was over 150 times that of the ground, and the temperature was around 200 degrees Celsius.
From this moment on, those ion excavation equipment would face more tests, and the damage rate would further increase.
A few days later, the excavation depth officially broke through the 10,000-meter mark.
The temperature here had risen to around 300 degrees Celsius. And under the enormous pressure, the rock was no longer indestructible but had taken on fluid characteristics like sludge.
They would continuously squeeze into the deep well interior, trying to occupy these empty areas.
Fortunately, the high-temperature, high-pressure gas would vitrify the well wall, sealing potential seepage or gas leak areas while providing certain support for the well wall.
The high-pressure argon gas provided even stronger pressure, pushing back the rocks trying to “crawl” over and maintaining the integrity of the deep well.
At the ground base, drill pipes were still being connected section by section and continuously lowered, just much slower than before.
Time passed bit by bit like this.
At this moment, on the screen in front of Sun Changhe, which had once been mostly green dots, it was now almost entirely occupied by red dots.
At this moment, with one month left until the apocalypse, the deepest excavation depth had officially broken through the 20,000-meter mark, and the ion excavation equipment still operating normally was down to fewer than 100 units.
Less than one-fifth of the original total.
But… even the ion excavation equipment located at the thinnest part of the earth’s crust was still about 1000 meters away from finally penetrating the crust.
At this moment, the excavation speed had slowed to an average of less than 100 meters per day. Even if everything went smoothly, it would still take half a month to drill the first deep well.
And among the other deep wells, the thickest crust reached 25,000 meters, requiring at least two months to have any hope of penetrating.
