About a hundred kilometres north of Murmansk, on the remote Kola Peninsula tundra near the Norwegian border, sits a rusty steel cap welded to the ground. Beneath it is the Kola Superdeep Borehole — the deepest hole ever drilled by humans, a Soviet scientific project that ran from 1970 to 1992.
The site is hard to reach without a guide; the surrounding research buildings have been stripped and abandoned, and the road in is often impassable in winter. Operators in Murmansk occasionally run day trips when the weather is right. The pilgrimage is more about the sheer strangeness of the project than anything visually impressive — at the surface, it's just a metal disc on a slab.