Reborn Before the Apocalypse: My Backing is the Nation

Chapter 160 The Ten-Thousand-Meter Abyss
Earth's crust base No. 156.

Like the other bases, this one was surrounded by thick dust and toxic air.

The ion tunneling equipment has been working continuously for five days and has reached a tunneling depth of 4800 meters.

Due to the increased depth, its tunneling speed could no longer be maintained at the initial 1000 meters per day. Consequently, the demand for drill pipe transportation and installation speed also gradually decreased.

This can probably be considered good news.

The tunneling depth of 4800 meters means that during the five-day tunneling process, a total of 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity was consumed, and approximately 33 cubic meters of rock, weighing approximately 73 tons, was turned into dust and toxic gas and released into the atmosphere, with most of it scattered over an area of ​​several hundred square kilometers around the base.

At this moment, almost all the land around the base was covered by a thick layer of dust. Whether it was a car wheel running over it or someone stepping on it, a layer of dust would immediately rise up.

In the deepest parts, the dust was almost a meter thick. Even at the edges, this dust was enough to completely cover the earth, turning the whole world gray.

That's a mass of 73 tons. On average, that means each square meter of that 300-plus square kilometers of land would receive about 2 kilograms of dust.

But this is just the beginning. Several times more toxic dust and gases will be emitted in the future.

But at that moment, the ground beneath their feet suddenly trembled. The next instant, the gray "dragon" that had been continuously spewing out of the deep well was mixed with a crimson color.

Its power was so great that even the wall of wind equipped with dozens of giant fans could not blow it away.

It rose suddenly, and almost instantly, it snapped the special ropes that were pulled out from the four cable-stayed bridges.

The massive, 10,000-ton, 5000-meter-long tunneling machine crashed down, slamming into the ground thousands of meters below. A cloud of flames and smoke shot hundreds of meters into the air, forming a mushroom cloud.

People's hearts sank instantly.

This ion tunneling equipment, which cost a fortune and required countless hours of effort to manufacture, is now completely destroyed.

Judging from the type of disaster, it appears to be an explosion caused by an internal energy overload?

But the specific reason for its destruction seems unimportant. What matters is that it's destroyed and has lost all value for maintenance or repair.

The engineers who had been working here for months stared blankly at the scene, unable to recover for a long time. Meanwhile, the effects of this sudden equipment failure continued to spread unseen by the public.

With the addition of supporting facilities, the total power of a crustal base is approximately 1GW, which means it consumes 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per hour.

Compared to the global power grid's total load of 18.5 TW, this may seem insignificant. However, the sudden disappearance of this load and the instantaneous reduction in electricity consumption still caused a series of ripples within the power grid.

At that moment, the power grid frequency suddenly increased, and the rotor speed of generators in some nuclear power plants and thermal power plants suddenly increased.

The supercomputer at the global power grid dispatch center instantly detected these changes. Under the automated dispatch program, an instruction traveled at the speed of light to more than a dozen giant dams.

The cascading water disappeared quickly, and as it spun rapidly, the hydroelectric turbines that had been generating electricity ceased operation.

Thousands of high-powered pumps deployed in the downstream reservoir started operating simultaneously, pumping the water that had been released into the downstream reservoir after completing the power generation process back into the upstream reservoir.

At the same time, multiple giant energy storage power stations also fully unloaded their loads, eagerly drawing energy from the power grid like an ox drinking water, taking over the power load that had disappeared due to the sudden offline of the giant ion tunneling equipment.

Immediately afterwards, the slower-adjusting thermal and nuclear power units began to reduce their output, gradually lowering the grid frequency, and the pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations and giant energy storage power stations were finally phased out. Base 156 was abandoned without hesitation.

As for the damaged environment in the surrounding area... we'll talk about that later.

One of the 500 green dots on the global map that marks the Doomsday Command Center has turned red.

The next moment, another red one appeared.

Sun Changhe glanced at it and found it was Base 339.

"The most likely cause of the failure was excessively high formation pressure in the middle section, which breached the vitrified wellbore and argon gas pressure, leading to the complete damage of the tunneling equipment..."

Sun Changhe nodded slightly.

He knew that as the tunneling depth continued to increase, this situation would occur more and more frequently in the coming period of time.

Ten days later, the tunneling depth increased to 7000 meters, reaching the category of ultra-deep wells in the traditional sense. At this point, there were still 409 ion tunneling machines in operation.

At a depth of 7000 meters underground, even in a deep well where only atmospheric pressure exists and there is no rock pressure, the air pressure is more than 150 times that at the surface, and the temperature is around 200 degrees Celsius.

From this moment on, those ion tunneling devices will face even greater challenges, and the rate of damage will further increase.

A few days later, the tunneling depth officially broke through the 10,000-meter mark.

The temperature here has risen to around 300 degrees Celsius. And under immense pressure, the rock is no longer indestructible, but has become fluid, like silt.

They will continuously push into the deep well, trying to occupy these empty areas.

Fortunately, the high-temperature, high-pressure gas vitrifies the well wall, sealing any potential seepage or gas leakage while also providing some support to the well wall.

High-pressure argon gas provides even greater pressure, pushing back the rocks that try to "wriggle" in, thus maintaining the integrity of the deep well.

At the ground base, drill pipes were still being connected section by section and continued to sink, but the speed was much slower than before.

Time passed by little by little.

At this moment, the screen in front of Sun Changhe, which used to be mostly green dots, is now almost entirely covered by red dots.

With one month left until the end of the world, the deepest tunnel has officially broken through the 2-meter mark, and there are now less than 100 ion tunneling machines still in normal operation.

It's less than one-fifth of the original total.

But... even the ion tunneling machine located at the weakest point of the Earth's crust is still about 1000 meters away from finally breaking through the crust.

At this point, the tunneling speed has slowed to less than 100 meters per day on average. Even if everything goes smoothly, it will still take another half a month to drill the first deep well.

Among the remaining deep wells, the one with the thickest crust reaches 2.5 meters, and it would take at least two months to break through it.

(End of this chapter)