In the 1970s, Soviet scientists embarked on an ambitious project to drill deep into the earth's crust on the Kola Peninsula, hoping to reach the mantle and unlock the secrets of the planet's history. This endeavor, which resulted in the deepest man-made hole on the planet, was a scientific race against time and nature, mirroring the cold war competition for technological supremacy. The project, which was abandoned in 1966, provided scientists with a unique, timeline view of the early earth, revealing a surprisingly normal picture of the planet, almost recognizable, and yet elsewhere, rocks from just a hundred million years earlier tell a very different story of chemical and climatic catastrophe that brought the entire living planet to its knees.