What lies beneath us? In this segment we take a look at the places under the places, exploring how our unseen underground conditions shape our ability to live above.
This may include holes and pits created for the purpose of infrastructure development, such as the stormwater systems beneath our streets. It may also include geologically natural holes, produced by many millennia of slow pressures and the movements of soil, magma, water and rock in days past. This deep history of a location, the bones of its geology, inform the finite limits of the place and ultimately its future destiny.
Finally, it may include holes and pits created as byproducts of industry. To us, these are often the most interesting holes. Historical holes and pits are also often tied to economies of extraction–mining precious metals, fracking for oil, digging for wells.
As artifacts of these choices, holes and pits often speak to historical imbalances of power over land, and in their making they often reveal or cause long-standing environmental issues.
Today in Holes and Pits: The Mir mine in Russia, a 525 meter deep and 1 mi wide crater bored into the Siberian permafrost and bedrock, in pursuit of diamond drill bits for Soviet industry:
