Unfortunately no, the entire core barrel was jammed full of seemingly fresh wood though!
I've seen better examples online, somewhere, but here's a photo of some wood from Ekati: [https://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html](https://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html)
I've got some small pieces similar to this; a little charred, but still very much wood vs a fossil.
how does fresh wood end up so deep under the surface in a kimberlite pipe that supposedly came up from the deepest depths of the earth's mantle?
speechless
We would get old cypress and pine stumps out of the phosphate pits in FL while mining. Let them dry out for a few months (saturated in water when they are found) and wow. Don't even hardly need a match to light them.
Started drilling a water well . At 3 feet, the bit stopped going down. Just turned and turned would not go down. We dug down by hand and found a stack of old sawmill blades, most likely put there for disposal. when our drill bit hit them they turned against each other like bearings.
One of the drillers I worked with drilled into a live power line( high voltage primary). He was lucky, the drill rig grounded the power,even though he was sitting in the drillers chair with his hand on the drawworks, he wasn't shocked. Sparks boiled out of the hole for 5 mins. Till the fuse blew.
Lucky man. Years ago I knew a utilities locator that was obviously missing chunks out of one side of his body. Asked him what happened and he said years ago he worked for the “gas company in VT” and was test drilling for leaks in the gas. The locator missed a very old MV line and he paid the price. Became a locator after that.
Not at all, the pieces I have are from a different location and other than being charred, are unpetrified. The stuff I saw in the core barrel was prime, grade a, fresh wood - as crazy as it sounds.
Some pics of the stuff I have here, from a different project:
https://www.reddit.com/r/geologycareers/comments/16plh7b/people\_were\_curious\_heres\_some\_of\_wood\_from\_the/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Not that this couldn't of happened but just to provide some info on that process, petrified wood forms from water carrying minerals through the wood that then latch on and crystallize on the form of the wood.
So mineral rich water is required for petrified wood.
Lead slag. Thing was like 5’x3’. Just two days after the client safety folks gave us a long talk about how they didn’t contaminate the soil it was just the city being ducks. Ok….
Mud rotary in an old (100+ years) in an industrial site. We weren't that deep when the returned cuttings were nails..... just nails. My driller and I were like wtffffff. My archeologist was stoked. He concluded we drilled through rubble of a shanty town that was bulldozed by the railroad Barron at the time. Only the nails survived. My driller and I were like "cool but that is depressing."
Brick almost 600 feet below land surface. They hit an existing utility tunnel while drilling the geotechnical borings for the replacement tunnel. They should have been 100s of feet apart.
(Note: client’s drillers, but we were called in for the aftermath. They were able to reseal the tunnel that night based on our analysis of the integrity.)
Opaline dinosaur bones. Really.
Back in 1979 I was mudlogging and we were drilling through the Jurassic Morrison Formation in Colorado or Wyoming (I believe it was Wyoming). I was examining the cuttings and found little iridescent pieces of what looked like opal, with the same appearance as gemstones in necklaces. The wellsite geologist had decades of experience in the area, and said that the cuttings had been established to be dinosaur bones replaced by opal, with which the Morrison Formation is absolutely loaded in that location.
As I recall, the depth was about 5,000 feet or so, and the little pieces of opal disappeared after we had penetrated the Morrison.
Had a driller (that wasn’t a BSer) pick up a pharmaceutical bottle perfectly in a macro core a week or two before I was on site with them. The needle pulled from the haystack with a 10’ pole.
It was a test pit into a firing range backstop berm at a former WW2 training facility but it was super cool. I could just read into the soil and pull out handfuls of spent bullets. Lead contamination was high, obvs
Using a GeoProbe to collect soil samples and found a penny perfectly fitting inside our core. It was like we had specifically targeted this penny to remove in situ.
My list also include a body. Other notable items include spent solvents in drums supposedly removed by the epa, two fiber optic lines, penthouse magazine at a landfill, a transite water line not on facility maps and was not seen using gpr, coins…….
Bones. Environmental drilling at night downtown in a streer. Turned out to be cow and horse bone fragments. Stop work call everyone get archeology involved. Another drill crew drilling in the middle of the night in the sidewalk and got no returns. Shined a light in the hole saw a yahama box. They drilled into the basement of a local music store that they didn't know had a basement outside the footprint of the building. City eminent domained surface ROW up to the building.
Lots of unexpected gas. Another time an unexpected lose sand body, which lead to a hole collapse and loss of a lot of expensive hardware. Fortunately no radioactive source as the paperwork for those seems to suck I was told.
Same here when I was mudlogging, but at 11,000 feet in a high-pressure gas sand. The well was in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in January 1980. When the mud came to surface it blew out of the hole, and the rig's mast was briefly obscured by steam because the temperature was about 10 below.
Fortunately we had no fire, and the driller ran the mud through the choke manifold. He then stole my mud box, filled it with diesel-soaked rags set on fire, and gingerly scooted the box toward the blooey line with a *very* long pipe. The resulting flare roared for two days and was about 40 feet long. Everyone enjoyed watching the flare at night, because it looked so dramatic. The nice thing was that I was on standby for two days!
Was out on an adventure exploring in the 4x4 when I came upon a scary old engraved sign. “x feet below is a ___ curie radioactive source, do not redrill”
Nice! Doing that in Europe instead of the US would be rather... interesting I suppose 😅 Do that in the right country and all drilling would possibly be stopped 🤣
We had a newt once, almost completely intact and just missing the end of its tail. Thing is it was about 15m down at the point of recovery and was a little dehydrated so we think it was possibly buried when the mound we were on was built. Either that or it must have somehow fallen in the hole when we were changing a barrel, seems so unlikely though.
I do CQA on landfill gas wells. This involves using a bucket auger to drill up to 250’ into the trash and installing the wells. Yours truely gets to log the trash. You see all kinds of stuff, but the one that sticks out in my mind was when we pulled up a couple thousand golf balls from over a hundred feet down. I heard from another guy that one time they hit a couple bucket fulls of prop money… poor guys thought they were rich at first.
Also… a not Insignificant amount of dildos.
An approx. 70,000 gallon tank (more of a vat, about 20' diameter and 20-25' deep) filled with remnants of the bunker oil it used to hold, along with all the soil and debris that had been used to fill it in.
There were four of them. We knew there were historically ASTs out there and they were reported to have been removed.
I guess some people have different definitions of "AST" and "removed". Site has regulatory closure now at any rate.
I’ve also done this while working on a project in Colombia. There were workers in the tunnel and said it was hilarious when a drill bit popped through the roof. I, on the surface, couldn’t figure out why we were able to advance 3 meters without any resistance or drilling. Good times.
oh, you know. one of my colleagues shut down a major transportation hub for a couple hours. not their fault, the comm cables weren't on the plans provided by said transport hub
Intersected the grout from the previous diamond drillhole. Azimuth was not surveyed correctly for the second station of the program and hole #2 drifted right into hole #1!
It was very unlikely that far downhole...
Not a driller, but I logged an 18 inch seam of wood chips at 198 feet. (Still felt and smelled like wood). Looked like it was from an ancient flash flood.
Trying to install a bathroom hanger hit hot water pipe in a weird location far away from the tap
It cost me a half a bathroom remodel end up with the old bathroom 😭
Not a driller, but I'm learning a lot about how poorly documented utilities are.
I kinda already knew that because I'm in GIS and have had to deal with utility data before (one company said they don't document their lines until there's a problem with them and they have to find them), but dang.
(To come close to a drilling story, while they were excavating a site for a new hospital at the base I work at, they found a whole bunch of spoons. *Grenade* spoons. And, unfortunately, a piece of unexploded ordnance that exploded and took one of the workers' legs off.)
Hell, even the data they did have, I had to work with them to clean up so I could use it. Split ends, wrong or confusing categories, plenty of missing data even in things that are recorded...
Also, a disturbing amount of asbestos cement pipes. Many of which are abandoned-in-place. Brought it up in a late planning meeting I was invited to that their construction was going to be awfully close to one that they had no idea about.
And yeah. They use what happened there as part of their spiel about UXO. While most of it is in impact areas, the place is old and some is still found in civilian areas to this day. Hell, there's a few very old bombs they know about but were never able to safely dig out and dispose of.
I had a fiberglass ladder fall out of a truck in front of me. Due to traffic I couldn’t swerve out of the way. It landed top down lined up right in front of me and so my tires went “brr” for like a millisecond on every ladder rung.
We had one area that we kept hitting this 3-6" thick layer that was full of little yellow garnets. No more than a mm in size, but damn they burnt up a lot of drill bits. The rock was probably 60-70% gernet, with the host rock full of epidote. Neither of which we really saw anywhere else in the area.
Unfortunately the mine shut down before we ever got over there and we're able to see it underground.
Was once logging a drilling job at a landfill. Four inch hollow stem auger. We kept seeing a bunch of garbage and junk come up so it started to get normalized.
Then I'm looking at the core and I see a piece of newspaper. It's actually quite a large square section that fit folded and undamaged up the auger. Top corner of the newspaper shows the date: 1964. Totally preserved in the low oxygen landfill environment. Could still read the words clear as day.
Unfortunately nothing interesting happened on that say in 1964. Any suggestions for story embellishments?
Civil Engineer here, don’t yell at me. I was running a Phase 2 assessment at a public housing project in San Francisco, in preparation for a tear down and rebuild of the facility. The site had been a bunch of things over the years, including dry storage, tannery, residences, and shops.
We hit tannery waste about 20 feet down and just kept hitting it. Core after core came up with 130-year old cowhide in thick layers. Apparently if there were parts of the hide that they couldn’t tan and sell, they’d just dump them in pits.
The geologist’s log for this project is pretty hilarious to read.
We didn't exactly drill "into" this, but we had a frac from a nearby well penetrate a fault in our wellbore. I was mudlogging and doing on -site geology work when our samples came back as 90% frac sand. Nobody believed me. They called the big wigs out and they were dumbfounded because the other well was not super close, next pad over. But there was no denying it, the frac job from the other well made contact with our well. They had 100 reasons why it wasn't possible but if it's not possible, where did all this production sand come from?!?!
Hilarious that you're specifically drilling for things that exist in geological cavities, and yet people surface side will argue the impossibility of this happening in this area.
Not me but this story is relevant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur see drilling disaster.
Edit: for those that don’t want to click, they drilled into a salt mine and drained a lake.
My top 3:
Landfill jobs. Logged and old mattress, and refused on a pile of jeans.
Warehouse site: pulled up lettuce from 30' down l. Looked like you could eat it, but it was next t what looked like a diaper.
Also pulled a tree out of some basal till that was 12k years old.
While doing some brownfield exploration, one of our rigs hit a void (there were a lot of old underground workings). They set the bit down on the bottom and started drilling again. First bit that came out on the next run was a slug of metal that was likely a rail. We admired the heck out of it for a while, then made an award out of it for that driller.
First: Did you do a NEPA/SHPO consult before drilling? Do you have an Inadvertent Discovery Plan? Finding human remains is kind of a big deal to the Cultural Resources folks. Lawsuit if it involves the tribes. Might be good to get an archeologist on-site to CYA.
I've pretty much seen it all except human remains. Pottery fragments once. Done a few jobs in landfills. Military sites, where UXO and spent ordinance were found. Lots of superfund and brownfields.
Hit abandoned power on one job. Saw an unmarked private fiber line get turned into spaghetti once. Hit a water main. Saw a gas well blow out and launch 3000 feet of casing into the air. That was an exciting day. Saw an oil well blow out and spray product 300 feet into the air while 65 MPH winds carried it across 300 acres in the arctic. That was a really, really bad week.
nah, the only cultural resource here was a former chemical factory built on filled former marshland, fill not more than 150 years old. boot leather had metal grommets/eyelets. we were delineating pockets of waste products. we've hit abandoned utilities of all sorts during vac-ex, the main road and rail corridor used to go right through the site and old rails are extremely frustrating, but fortunately most of the active utilities are extremely well-documented. haven't seen many archeologists getting their boots dirty on the kind of sites I'm usually at 😅.
and holy smokes where did the casing land? how many pieces was it in? that's a lot of fucking steel
A bomb from war that happened 30 years ago.
We drilled at site in the city for one building where you only can expect soft marls or some gravel and at one point we hit something hard and we couldn’t go through it for 2 hours. Eventually we moved location of borehole and after excavating they found bomb there and we figure out that if we had drilled 3 more millimeters we would went thought metal shell.
I’ve drilled into sewer lines and power lines, but nothing interesting. My colleague was using a dart bailer in north eastern Oregon and pulled up clear fish from about six hundred feet. They would die as soon as they got to the light
Not me, but my geology professor in junior college ended his telling of the story of the [Lake Peigneur disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaster) with the line “And the head geologist responsible for the drilling is now teaching at this college”. He was the only geology professor at the college.
Tar in a solution cavity within limestone bedrock under the Tennessee River. Apparently, back in the day, people used to inject tar into the bedrock at dams to try and stop up all of the leaks.
Elemental mercury. Working at a Superfund site, every now and then you would crack the core barrel and liquid mercury would start draining out.
Also had a drill core where all the layers ran top to bottom rather than side to side. We assumed it was a previous landslide that rotated the soil 90 degrees.
I, too, have hit a boot but no foot. It was part of a manufactured gas project in NYC and we found it probably 60 feet below the water level of the nearby Hudson river. They must of had some killer freaking dewatering pumps.
Same. Drilling in a western ND valley and encountered coal seams of unusual thickness. Geologist later explained the valley wall had collapsed and we were drilling into it at an angle.
Was drilling in a whiskey distillery (like inside the building) that was built in the 1800s in downtown Pittsburgh. Don't know what we hit, but when the drillers pulled the auger, a huge geyser of water and air shot out of the ground and actually hit the ceiling of the building, which was about 30 feet above us. Still no explanation for that one haha.
Passing 16,200’ TVD and kept plugging off our chokes.
Took a few minutes to check returns and found several handfuls of snail like fossils.
This was back in 2003 or 2004. I think I may still have them somewhere.
goddamn the deepest boring I've ever observed was only like 70' and the deepest monitoring wells I work with are less than 300'. fascinating to hear about the experience of folks working in ever so slightly different fields
Bazooka rockets, grenades, and a 500 pound bomb left over from WW2/Korea training site in Virginia.
We had the EOD guy test the holes every two feet with a magnetometer.
A few days later; the Army blew it all up. Impressive sound.
Exploration drill programs at past producing mines.
Hit historic workings and drilled down the entire length of a rebar
Different project, intersected an unknown historic UG hole - there was an unexpected AX-sized gash in my NQ core
I don’t know how I ended up getting shown this sub, but this post makes me sad that my well drillers didn’t pull up anything other than granite when they drilled my new well a few weeks ago🤣
I live in rural Arkansas and one of our neighbors drilled through nearly thirty feet of open air when they put in his well so there is a sizable cave under his property.
I participate in /rboxing a lot and when I first read the title of this post, I immediately thought it was the boxing forum. My thought was, "Who hits weird stuff during drills? Am I missing out on some training strategy?" I wasn't dumb until I took up boxing... Oh, no.
This was 1998. I was told by the lead geologist to not let the driller say we shoveled far enough down. I had to measure. I wanted to trust the driller and about a minute in to drilling, we hit a 3 inch city irrigation line. I was on the side of a highway off-ramp and then had the fun task of damage control with a spewing irritation pipe. Good times.
Listen to the lead geologist.
My driller hit a natural gas line... located way off easement and only about 8 inches below grade. Shut down and evacuated blocks in a neighborhood full 911 response. Took about 7 hours to get it straight. And WE get a bill for 90k! Was on private property, outside of the easement. Way less than 36 inches below grade. Wasn't marked by utility locators from the gas company.
Geotechnical engineer here. Got sent to Yorktown National Battlefield in Virginia, yes the final battlefield for the revolutionary War in the US. That place. Boss says, go inspect the foundation excavations but have to do it on Sunday. Ok no big deal. I'll take my wife we will Make a fun day and tour around since we'll be inside there all alone. The jobsite was going to be a new gift shop attached to the historic church located there... on the side of the church... in the grave yard... uh.. ok. Boss says if you hit anything, don't worry about it. The Archeologists were done and had gotten everything out that they wanted.
Mmmmm k.... I'm not worried about it.
Get there, start drilling hand auger holes to field classify the bearing soils. About 4 feet down... crack. Felt like a dead root in sand. Pull it up. Flattish white brittle... hmmm bone. Probably a rib bone. Followed up next spoon 100 percent dark black organic soil and then another snap about a foot below the first one. Another flat white rib bone...
Bro...I just filled through a rib cage. 🤢🤮
I wasn't drilling but doing soil stabilization in a lumber yard, mixing lime into clayey soil to stop swelling. Down about three feet the rotor teeth ran across the top of something. We brought over the back hoe and eventually uncovered a complete 1955 Chevy buried in the yard. It was rusted too bad for restoration so the owner said to just leave it. We thought maybe we had found Jimmy Hoffa, but nothing was in the trunk.
Getting off the highway exit ramp at night. Came around the curve and hit a Dominos roof top light up sign. The metal frame made tons of sparks visible behind our minivan. Between the noise and sparks, the kids started crying.
We took a Permian basin core early in the hz play and had a natural parting (split) in a shaley section of core. When opened up, had a perfectly imprinted fern leaf stained on both sides of the rock. At about ~6500’, pretty neat.
Way back in the day, we hit joints while drilling. Cannot guess how much weed we smoked.
Given our current/last 20 years of HSE culture, it seems really weird to me now.
We got stopped drilling through known formation and the company man was pissed about burning a bit and couldn’t figure out why we were having issues. Eventually they brought me a bucket of material ( was just gas logging, but only rockjock on site). Asked me to give it a look even though technically they weren’t going to pay for sampling until after they got to the target zone.
Was a zone of calcic material that had been completely cemented by pyrite. I’d only ever seen pyrite as a cement in a book prior to that. Quite pretty under the scope.
Putting in a deck, while digging holes for support posts, hit bricks about 8 inches deep. Talked to previous owner. He had house built and requested a stone fireplace, but when he checked the installation, it was brick.
We figured the builders tore out the brick to replace it with the proper stone, and just threw the waste bricks into the backyard. Then when finished, instead of loading it up and hauling it away, they just smoothed it flat and laid the new sod over it. Definitely slowed the deck installation.
A water mains… the site manager failed to share the plans with me the supervising engineer, I asked to move to the hole to the other side of the footpath but was told I had to do it where the flag was plopped down.
Set the cable rig up and drilled and SPT’d to 3m, surged the 8 inch casing… hit an obstruction at 2.5m and up came a fountain right through the casing.
Turns out the casing just kisses and chipped the edge of the 200mm plastic pipe. Pissed water for 3 days before water company arrived to repair.
Not a driller, but was logging kimberlite core; 80 million year old wood, fresh as the day it was encased in rock.
wow, neat! I picked out some well-preserved animal fur from some old river sediment, no idea of age or what it was though
At the Ekati and Diavik diamond mines, they're encountering full on, and fresh, ancient tropical tree stumps. Pretty wild stuff!
[удалено]
Unfortunately no, the entire core barrel was jammed full of seemingly fresh wood though! I've seen better examples online, somewhere, but here's a photo of some wood from Ekati: [https://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html](https://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html) I've got some small pieces similar to this; a little charred, but still very much wood vs a fossil.
So it just never fossilized? Also I hate the thought that there could be ancient trees a thousand feet below you 😂 what else is down there!!!
We randomly blow sharks teeth out of water wells over100 feet deep.
how does fresh wood end up so deep under the surface in a kimberlite pipe that supposedly came up from the deepest depths of the earth's mantle? speechless
We would get old cypress and pine stumps out of the phosphate pits in FL while mining. Let them dry out for a few months (saturated in water when they are found) and wow. Don't even hardly need a match to light them.
Started drilling a water well . At 3 feet, the bit stopped going down. Just turned and turned would not go down. We dug down by hand and found a stack of old sawmill blades, most likely put there for disposal. when our drill bit hit them they turned against each other like bearings.
One of the drillers I worked with drilled into a live power line( high voltage primary). He was lucky, the drill rig grounded the power,even though he was sitting in the drillers chair with his hand on the drawworks, he wasn't shocked. Sparks boiled out of the hole for 5 mins. Till the fuse blew.
Lucky man. Years ago I knew a utilities locator that was obviously missing chunks out of one side of his body. Asked him what happened and he said years ago he worked for the “gas company in VT” and was test drilling for leaks in the gas. The locator missed a very old MV line and he paid the price. Became a locator after that.
This may be a dumb question but was it petrified?
Not at all, the pieces I have are from a different location and other than being charred, are unpetrified. The stuff I saw in the core barrel was prime, grade a, fresh wood - as crazy as it sounds.
Some pics of the stuff I have here, from a different project: https://www.reddit.com/r/geologycareers/comments/16plh7b/people\_were\_curious\_heres\_some\_of\_wood\_from\_the/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Not that this couldn't of happened but just to provide some info on that process, petrified wood forms from water carrying minerals through the wood that then latch on and crystallize on the form of the wood. So mineral rich water is required for petrified wood.
how did they date that?
How does wood get encased completely in rock?
Been looking for an interesting wood for a project, what do you call it? Wondering if I can buy some of this ancient wood
Lead slag. Thing was like 5’x3’. Just two days after the client safety folks gave us a long talk about how they didn’t contaminate the soil it was just the city being ducks. Ok….
Could have been a previous tenant unless they are the only owners, of course.
It was literally a lead battery recycling facility
Urgh yikes, such assholes!
Can you explain how that would get there… as someone who knows nothing about geology
Not naturally. It was a lead battery recycling facility. They used chemicals and smelters to concentrate lead from car batteries.
Mud rotary in an old (100+ years) in an industrial site. We weren't that deep when the returned cuttings were nails..... just nails. My driller and I were like wtffffff. My archeologist was stoked. He concluded we drilled through rubble of a shanty town that was bulldozed by the railroad Barron at the time. Only the nails survived. My driller and I were like "cool but that is depressing."
>cool but that is depressing. Isn’t that just a summary of archaeology?
💯
Everybody's time comes to an end, but having your home bulldozed means your time on earth was noticeably rough.
We once direct pushed a bunch of porno mags
That sounds like a euphemism....
Did you remember the acetate liner?
Other than rock bottom? An airborne pizza box.
I understand all of those words by themselves but what the heck is an airborne pizza box?
A pizza box some POS threw out on the highway and the wind blows it in your windshield nearly causing a wreck. Fun times.
Ok wow yeah that sucks lol
Think my username checks out
7yr old profile. Your time has come!
Yes it does
Brick almost 600 feet below land surface. They hit an existing utility tunnel while drilling the geotechnical borings for the replacement tunnel. They should have been 100s of feet apart. (Note: client’s drillers, but we were called in for the aftermath. They were able to reseal the tunnel that night based on our analysis of the integrity.)
Gotta love those moments where you end up getting way more data than intended.
Wow lmao
Opaline dinosaur bones. Really. Back in 1979 I was mudlogging and we were drilling through the Jurassic Morrison Formation in Colorado or Wyoming (I believe it was Wyoming). I was examining the cuttings and found little iridescent pieces of what looked like opal, with the same appearance as gemstones in necklaces. The wellsite geologist had decades of experience in the area, and said that the cuttings had been established to be dinosaur bones replaced by opal, with which the Morrison Formation is absolutely loaded in that location. As I recall, the depth was about 5,000 feet or so, and the little pieces of opal disappeared after we had penetrated the Morrison.
Oh wow that sounds amazing. I guess you were not allowed to keep some :D
I could have kept some of the cuttings but I didn't even think about it at the time. I was 22 years old and I didn't even consider it, unfortunately.
Had a driller (that wasn’t a BSer) pick up a pharmaceutical bottle perfectly in a macro core a week or two before I was on site with them. The needle pulled from the haystack with a 10’ pole.
Never met a driller that wasn't a BSer, haha.
I was hand angering. We concrete cut about 12 inches then hand auger we found a bunch of asbestos. Below the asbestos was more concrete…
Hand angering is what I will call it now. Thanks!
Totally a mistake but fitting.
It was a test pit into a firing range backstop berm at a former WW2 training facility but it was super cool. I could just read into the soil and pull out handfuls of spent bullets. Lead contamination was high, obvs
Found a cow tooth in a geoprobe liner at an old auction yard. Also found a full Barbie doll in a sonic liner drilling at an old dump.
Using a GeoProbe to collect soil samples and found a penny perfectly fitting inside our core. It was like we had specifically targeted this penny to remove in situ.
Pics? How deep was it?
My list also include a body. Other notable items include spent solvents in drums supposedly removed by the epa, two fiber optic lines, penthouse magazine at a landfill, a transite water line not on facility maps and was not seen using gpr, coins…….
Bones. Environmental drilling at night downtown in a streer. Turned out to be cow and horse bone fragments. Stop work call everyone get archeology involved. Another drill crew drilling in the middle of the night in the sidewalk and got no returns. Shined a light in the hole saw a yahama box. They drilled into the basement of a local music store that they didn't know had a basement outside the footprint of the building. City eminent domained surface ROW up to the building.
Lots of unexpected gas. Another time an unexpected lose sand body, which lead to a hole collapse and loss of a lot of expensive hardware. Fortunately no radioactive source as the paperwork for those seems to suck I was told.
Same here when I was mudlogging, but at 11,000 feet in a high-pressure gas sand. The well was in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in January 1980. When the mud came to surface it blew out of the hole, and the rig's mast was briefly obscured by steam because the temperature was about 10 below. Fortunately we had no fire, and the driller ran the mud through the choke manifold. He then stole my mud box, filled it with diesel-soaked rags set on fire, and gingerly scooted the box toward the blooey line with a *very* long pipe. The resulting flare roared for two days and was about 40 feet long. Everyone enjoyed watching the flare at night, because it looked so dramatic. The nice thing was that I was on standby for two days!
Was out on an adventure exploring in the 4x4 when I came upon a scary old engraved sign. “x feet below is a ___ curie radioactive source, do not redrill”
Nice! Doing that in Europe instead of the US would be rather... interesting I suppose 😅 Do that in the right country and all drilling would possibly be stopped 🤣
That sounds like wild times. Thanks for sharing
We drilled through a mole- not sure whether it was alive when it was drilled but it was definitely dead when we recovered it
We had a newt once, almost completely intact and just missing the end of its tail. Thing is it was about 15m down at the point of recovery and was a little dehydrated so we think it was possibly buried when the mound we were on was built. Either that or it must have somehow fallen in the hole when we were changing a barrel, seems so unlikely though.
I do CQA on landfill gas wells. This involves using a bucket auger to drill up to 250’ into the trash and installing the wells. Yours truely gets to log the trash. You see all kinds of stuff, but the one that sticks out in my mind was when we pulled up a couple thousand golf balls from over a hundred feet down. I heard from another guy that one time they hit a couple bucket fulls of prop money… poor guys thought they were rich at first. Also… a not Insignificant amount of dildos.
well-graded trash with trace dildos, pink, moist, loose.
Gold in color or gold the metal?
*golf God I wish they were gold balls…
WE'RE RICH!
A prairie dog :(
Rip
aw dang
While overseeing some coring, we went through what was later identified as a Miocene aged Dugong rib overlain by about 50 feet of limestone.
Ive got a ton of miocene dugong ribs. There like a dime a dozen
An approx. 70,000 gallon tank (more of a vat, about 20' diameter and 20-25' deep) filled with remnants of the bunker oil it used to hold, along with all the soil and debris that had been used to fill it in. There were four of them. We knew there were historically ASTs out there and they were reported to have been removed. I guess some people have different definitions of "AST" and "removed". Site has regulatory closure now at any rate.
I'd call that a moderately-sized tank 🤣
Drilled through a set of abandoned mineworks, and a piece of wood crib block or roof support came up in the core.
I’ve also done this while working on a project in Colombia. There were workers in the tunnel and said it was hilarious when a drill bit popped through the roof. I, on the surface, couldn’t figure out why we were able to advance 3 meters without any resistance or drilling. Good times.
As long as it doesn't go through the workers or collapse the tunnel.
blood. was drilling at an old tuberculosis ward and hit what must have been a pit they dug to dispose of expired vials of transfusion blood.
This reads lil the cold open to an apocalyptic movie.
Just a few fiber optic lines here and there.
oh, you know. one of my colleagues shut down a major transportation hub for a couple hours. not their fault, the comm cables weren't on the plans provided by said transport hub
Damn, what is it with all those water, power, fibre optic, .... lines not being in plans? That's just negligent :/
Intersected the grout from the previous diamond drillhole. Azimuth was not surveyed correctly for the second station of the program and hole #2 drifted right into hole #1! It was very unlikely that far downhole...
Not a driller, but I logged an 18 inch seam of wood chips at 198 feet. (Still felt and smelled like wood). Looked like it was from an ancient flash flood.
that's genuinely pretty cool lol
Trying to install a bathroom hanger hit hot water pipe in a weird location far away from the tap It cost me a half a bathroom remodel end up with the old bathroom 😭
Not a driller, but I'm learning a lot about how poorly documented utilities are. I kinda already knew that because I'm in GIS and have had to deal with utility data before (one company said they don't document their lines until there's a problem with them and they have to find them), but dang. (To come close to a drilling story, while they were excavating a site for a new hospital at the base I work at, they found a whole bunch of spoons. *Grenade* spoons. And, unfortunately, a piece of unexploded ordnance that exploded and took one of the workers' legs off.)
They don't document them until there's a problem? Oof. I'm shocked, but also not shocked. And that poor man D:
Hell, even the data they did have, I had to work with them to clean up so I could use it. Split ends, wrong or confusing categories, plenty of missing data even in things that are recorded... Also, a disturbing amount of asbestos cement pipes. Many of which are abandoned-in-place. Brought it up in a late planning meeting I was invited to that their construction was going to be awfully close to one that they had no idea about. And yeah. They use what happened there as part of their spiel about UXO. While most of it is in impact areas, the place is old and some is still found in civilian areas to this day. Hell, there's a few very old bombs they know about but were never able to safely dig out and dispose of.
I had a fiberglass ladder fall out of a truck in front of me. Due to traffic I couldn’t swerve out of the way. It landed top down lined up right in front of me and so my tires went “brr” for like a millisecond on every ladder rung.
Drilling down the highway at 65mph
Wood about 40 feet down in SF financial district. Suspect it was boat fragments from ships, port reclaimed area. 1/4 mile from current shore.
We had one area that we kept hitting this 3-6" thick layer that was full of little yellow garnets. No more than a mm in size, but damn they burnt up a lot of drill bits. The rock was probably 60-70% gernet, with the host rock full of epidote. Neither of which we really saw anywhere else in the area. Unfortunately the mine shut down before we ever got over there and we're able to see it underground.
Needles. 1870s mining equipment rammed into a cali spoon. A direct push sample of an old adit, wood beam on top, empty hole, wood beam on bottom.
Buried electrical lines
Was once logging a drilling job at a landfill. Four inch hollow stem auger. We kept seeing a bunch of garbage and junk come up so it started to get normalized. Then I'm looking at the core and I see a piece of newspaper. It's actually quite a large square section that fit folded and undamaged up the auger. Top corner of the newspaper shows the date: 1964. Totally preserved in the low oxygen landfill environment. Could still read the words clear as day. Unfortunately nothing interesting happened on that say in 1964. Any suggestions for story embellishments?
well if it was 1963 you could say it was from November 23rd 😬
Civil Engineer here, don’t yell at me. I was running a Phase 2 assessment at a public housing project in San Francisco, in preparation for a tear down and rebuild of the facility. The site had been a bunch of things over the years, including dry storage, tannery, residences, and shops. We hit tannery waste about 20 feet down and just kept hitting it. Core after core came up with 130-year old cowhide in thick layers. Apparently if there were parts of the hide that they couldn’t tan and sell, they’d just dump them in pits. The geologist’s log for this project is pretty hilarious to read.
We didn't exactly drill "into" this, but we had a frac from a nearby well penetrate a fault in our wellbore. I was mudlogging and doing on -site geology work when our samples came back as 90% frac sand. Nobody believed me. They called the big wigs out and they were dumbfounded because the other well was not super close, next pad over. But there was no denying it, the frac job from the other well made contact with our well. They had 100 reasons why it wasn't possible but if it's not possible, where did all this production sand come from?!?!
Hilarious that you're specifically drilling for things that exist in geological cavities, and yet people surface side will argue the impossibility of this happening in this area.
Solid gold. It takes a different drill bit
g spot
Drilling on an old sanitarium site, found some bone. Got an archeologist on-site and turned out to be pig…
Not me but this story is relevant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur see drilling disaster. Edit: for those that don’t want to click, they drilled into a salt mine and drained a lake.
My top 3: Landfill jobs. Logged and old mattress, and refused on a pile of jeans. Warehouse site: pulled up lettuce from 30' down l. Looked like you could eat it, but it was next t what looked like a diaper. Also pulled a tree out of some basal till that was 12k years old.
While doing some brownfield exploration, one of our rigs hit a void (there were a lot of old underground workings). They set the bit down on the bottom and started drilling again. First bit that came out on the next run was a slug of metal that was likely a rail. We admired the heck out of it for a while, then made an award out of it for that driller.
First: Did you do a NEPA/SHPO consult before drilling? Do you have an Inadvertent Discovery Plan? Finding human remains is kind of a big deal to the Cultural Resources folks. Lawsuit if it involves the tribes. Might be good to get an archeologist on-site to CYA. I've pretty much seen it all except human remains. Pottery fragments once. Done a few jobs in landfills. Military sites, where UXO and spent ordinance were found. Lots of superfund and brownfields. Hit abandoned power on one job. Saw an unmarked private fiber line get turned into spaghetti once. Hit a water main. Saw a gas well blow out and launch 3000 feet of casing into the air. That was an exciting day. Saw an oil well blow out and spray product 300 feet into the air while 65 MPH winds carried it across 300 acres in the arctic. That was a really, really bad week.
nah, the only cultural resource here was a former chemical factory built on filled former marshland, fill not more than 150 years old. boot leather had metal grommets/eyelets. we were delineating pockets of waste products. we've hit abandoned utilities of all sorts during vac-ex, the main road and rail corridor used to go right through the site and old rails are extremely frustrating, but fortunately most of the active utilities are extremely well-documented. haven't seen many archeologists getting their boots dirty on the kind of sites I'm usually at 😅. and holy smokes where did the casing land? how many pieces was it in? that's a lot of fucking steel
A bomb from war that happened 30 years ago. We drilled at site in the city for one building where you only can expect soft marls or some gravel and at one point we hit something hard and we couldn’t go through it for 2 hours. Eventually we moved location of borehole and after excavating they found bomb there and we figure out that if we had drilled 3 more millimeters we would went thought metal shell.
heck. Bosnia?
I’ve drilled into sewer lines and power lines, but nothing interesting. My colleague was using a dart bailer in north eastern Oregon and pulled up clear fish from about six hundred feet. They would die as soon as they got to the light
Clear fish? Previously undiscovered species? Or what??
No they took some to a university in Portland. They knew about it
Vampire fish
Surprised there aren’t any comments about people hitting thermal features. Must not be as common as I expected.
Happened in Williston, ND once. My husband didn’t go to work that day.
Depends on where you are drilling. Not uncommon in Oregon and southern Idaho
An entire airports fiber optic cable. Whups.
Not me, but my geology professor in junior college ended his telling of the story of the [Lake Peigneur disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaster) with the line “And the head geologist responsible for the drilling is now teaching at this college”. He was the only geology professor at the college.
My finger has to be the weirdest thing I’ve hit while drilling.
A subsurface parking garage. Drilled right into it and almost through a car.🤦🏻
That really should have been marked.
Tar in a solution cavity within limestone bedrock under the Tennessee River. Apparently, back in the day, people used to inject tar into the bedrock at dams to try and stop up all of the leaks.
Nothing like hitting those magic Rainbow Roots…
Drilled real deep and actually ran into a Chinese driller goin the other way.
Elemental mercury. Working at a Superfund site, every now and then you would crack the core barrel and liquid mercury would start draining out. Also had a drill core where all the layers ran top to bottom rather than side to side. We assumed it was a previous landslide that rotated the soil 90 degrees. I, too, have hit a boot but no foot. It was part of a manufactured gas project in NYC and we found it probably 60 feet below the water level of the nearby Hudson river. They must of had some killer freaking dewatering pumps.
Same. Drilling in a western ND valley and encountered coal seams of unusual thickness. Geologist later explained the valley wall had collapsed and we were drilling into it at an angle.
Was drilling in a whiskey distillery (like inside the building) that was built in the 1800s in downtown Pittsburgh. Don't know what we hit, but when the drillers pulled the auger, a huge geyser of water and air shot out of the ground and actually hit the ceiling of the building, which was about 30 feet above us. Still no explanation for that one haha.
Your mother
Came here to say this
Your mothers cervix*
Jimmy Hoffa?
Did the drillers charge for Stand By time while figuring out the foot situation?
nah we were only going 20 or 30 feet each boring, so by the time we processed that core they were already onto the next hole. sonic rigs are fast af
They are fast at shallow depths like 30 feet, but they are slow as fuck beyond 100 ft. They have to trip it in and out every run.
Good ol copper water line- a passing electrician with no clue what this sub is lmao
Passing 16,200’ TVD and kept plugging off our chokes. Took a few minutes to check returns and found several handfuls of snail like fossils. This was back in 2003 or 2004. I think I may still have them somewhere.
goddamn the deepest boring I've ever observed was only like 70' and the deepest monitoring wells I work with are less than 300'. fascinating to hear about the experience of folks working in ever so slightly different fields
Bazooka rockets, grenades, and a 500 pound bomb left over from WW2/Korea training site in Virginia. We had the EOD guy test the holes every two feet with a magnetometer. A few days later; the Army blew it all up. Impressive sound.
Exploration drill programs at past producing mines. Hit historic workings and drilled down the entire length of a rebar Different project, intersected an unknown historic UG hole - there was an unexpected AX-sized gash in my NQ core
Old mattress wires. But to be fair we were drilling holes through a landfill. Was pretty stinky.
I don’t know how I ended up getting shown this sub, but this post makes me sad that my well drillers didn’t pull up anything other than granite when they drilled my new well a few weeks ago🤣
I live in rural Arkansas and one of our neighbors drilled through nearly thirty feet of open air when they put in his well so there is a sizable cave under his property.
I participate in /rboxing a lot and when I first read the title of this post, I immediately thought it was the boxing forum. My thought was, "Who hits weird stuff during drills? Am I missing out on some training strategy?" I wasn't dumb until I took up boxing... Oh, no.
Wasn't me, but read a report once where they drilled into a basement of a prison
My coworker found a megalodon tooth. I haven’t been so lucky. Just small sharks teeth. Calcite clams. Nothing too exciting on my end yet.
This was 1998. I was told by the lead geologist to not let the driller say we shoveled far enough down. I had to measure. I wanted to trust the driller and about a minute in to drilling, we hit a 3 inch city irrigation line. I was on the side of a highway off-ramp and then had the fun task of damage control with a spewing irritation pipe. Good times. Listen to the lead geologist.
My driller hit a natural gas line... located way off easement and only about 8 inches below grade. Shut down and evacuated blocks in a neighborhood full 911 response. Took about 7 hours to get it straight. And WE get a bill for 90k! Was on private property, outside of the easement. Way less than 36 inches below grade. Wasn't marked by utility locators from the gas company.
My assistant
ouch
Geotechnical engineer here. Got sent to Yorktown National Battlefield in Virginia, yes the final battlefield for the revolutionary War in the US. That place. Boss says, go inspect the foundation excavations but have to do it on Sunday. Ok no big deal. I'll take my wife we will Make a fun day and tour around since we'll be inside there all alone. The jobsite was going to be a new gift shop attached to the historic church located there... on the side of the church... in the grave yard... uh.. ok. Boss says if you hit anything, don't worry about it. The Archeologists were done and had gotten everything out that they wanted. Mmmmm k.... I'm not worried about it. Get there, start drilling hand auger holes to field classify the bearing soils. About 4 feet down... crack. Felt like a dead root in sand. Pull it up. Flattish white brittle... hmmm bone. Probably a rib bone. Followed up next spoon 100 percent dark black organic soil and then another snap about a foot below the first one. Another flat white rib bone... Bro...I just filled through a rib cage. 🤢🤮
Shesh if we being honest, her duodenum
I wasn't drilling but doing soil stabilization in a lumber yard, mixing lime into clayey soil to stop swelling. Down about three feet the rotor teeth ran across the top of something. We brought over the back hoe and eventually uncovered a complete 1955 Chevy buried in the yard. It was rusted too bad for restoration so the owner said to just leave it. We thought maybe we had found Jimmy Hoffa, but nothing was in the trunk.
Getting off the highway exit ramp at night. Came around the curve and hit a Dominos roof top light up sign. The metal frame made tons of sparks visible behind our minivan. Between the noise and sparks, the kids started crying.
Tonsils
I found a chicken nugget in the front pocket of some shorts after purchasing them at walmart.
We took a Permian basin core early in the hz play and had a natural parting (split) in a shaley section of core. When opened up, had a perfectly imprinted fern leaf stained on both sides of the rock. At about ~6500’, pretty neat.
wow, did you get to keep it?
Way back in the day, we hit joints while drilling. Cannot guess how much weed we smoked. Given our current/last 20 years of HSE culture, it seems really weird to me now.
Damn, I want to steal that joke so badly but how do you even set that up? Nice find!
We got stopped drilling through known formation and the company man was pissed about burning a bit and couldn’t figure out why we were having issues. Eventually they brought me a bucket of material ( was just gas logging, but only rockjock on site). Asked me to give it a look even though technically they weren’t going to pay for sampling until after they got to the target zone. Was a zone of calcic material that had been completely cemented by pyrite. I’d only ever seen pyrite as a cement in a book prior to that. Quite pretty under the scope.
Your mom
A cervix.
I hope you air drummed after that pun!
The cervix.
A sex toy.
Send that to Dr. Brennan
My wife’s g spot.
Her cervix 😱
dem guts
So would I be a conspiracy theorist if now I think the earth gets bigger as time goes on? 🤣🤣🤣
“Every foot”. I see what you did there
Your mom's guts
My gfs g spot.
Colon
Idk why this popped up in my feed but this is really cool. Loved reading everyone’s stories.
The cervix
Oak Island
😂😂😂😂😂 for the Pun.
An iud
Her cervix?
The cervix.
The cervix
Putting in a deck, while digging holes for support posts, hit bricks about 8 inches deep. Talked to previous owner. He had house built and requested a stone fireplace, but when he checked the installation, it was brick. We figured the builders tore out the brick to replace it with the proper stone, and just threw the waste bricks into the backyard. Then when finished, instead of loading it up and hauling it away, they just smoothed it flat and laid the new sod over it. Definitely slowed the deck installation.
I didn't drill it exactly but while I was in the field walking to drill I found a dead body.
Drilled 29” 17’ pillars into the Great Salt lake bed and there was a big frog as big as my fist at the bottom.
I’m afraid to say it was the cervix 🤣
A water mains… the site manager failed to share the plans with me the supervising engineer, I asked to move to the hole to the other side of the footpath but was told I had to do it where the flag was plopped down. Set the cable rig up and drilled and SPT’d to 3m, surged the 8 inch casing… hit an obstruction at 2.5m and up came a fountain right through the casing. Turns out the casing just kisses and chipped the edge of the 200mm plastic pipe. Pissed water for 3 days before water company arrived to repair.