10 Horrifying Things Miners Found Miles Beneath the Surface

Ten things that came up out of deep workings, and what each one overturned. A three-hundred-million-year-old forest exposed in the roof of a coal seam. A chamber of fifty-tonne crystals nobody can stand in for more than ten minutes. A cave sealed for five and a half million years with forty-eight species in it. A uranium seam that ran as a nuclear reactor. Water isolated for two billion years. An organism that needs nothing from the sun. A hole twelve kilometres deep that found no basalt. Antibiotic resistance four million years older than antibiotics. A feathered dinosaur tail on a market stall. And a tank of dry-cleaning fluid that broke the standard model. And in every case the hole was dug for something else entirely.