g., the Seal Sands borehole is the deepest borehole in UK at 4194 m; the Kola Superdeep Borehole at 12,262 m is the deepest borehole in the world, whereas Sakhalin-1 at 12,345 m is the longest). Here, changes to the rock fabric include the drilling of the borehole itself, together with any associated caving-in of the hole, especially where

poorly indurated rocks are drilled. Ancillary changes include infiltration of drilling mud into porous rock, and the addition to the rock mass of any casing left in the hole. Boreholes are no longer simply vertical holes, but now may involve arrays of carefully directed low-angle or horizontal holes steered so as to fully exploit underground resources. Fig. 3 shows the ∼1 million Selleck RG7204 boreholes in Great Britain colour-coded by depth (Fig. 4). By contrast with mining, the material extracted through boreholes is in fluid form (liquid or gas), selleckchem replacing oil, for instance by water drawn in from adjacent rocks (or with high-pressure carbon dioxide pumped down for sequestration or simply to enhance oil recovery). These changes to pore fluid composition may nowadays be tracked in real time with geophysical methods, and may be associated both with diagenetic mineralization and with topographic changes at the surface. A specific

variant is represented by the ∼1500 boreholes drilled in some restricted parts of the world for underground nuclear test explosions

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing). The holes here are mostly obliterated by a rather larger trace, comprising a mass of strongly shock-brecciated rock surrounding a melt core (both these faces currently being strongly radioactive), commonly being surrounded by roughly circular fault systems, outlining surface crater systems that, in the Yucca Flats test site, reach several hundred metres across (Grasso, 2000 and NNSA, 2005). The Cannikin underground test on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain generated sufficient melt that, cooled and crystallized, is equivalent to a moderate-sized Astemizole volcanic lava dome (Eichelberger et al., 2002). Increasingly, storage facilities are being constructed in the subsurface, in many cases because it is considered a safer environment to store potentially dangerous materials. These storage facilities may be constructed specifically to hold the materials, or in many cases re-use existing caverns produced during mineral excavation. These facilities are used to temporarily store energy resources, e.g. Liquefied Petroleum Gas or compressed air energy storage, to provide long-term burial of hazardous wastes such as nuclear waste, CO2 sequestration, or the re-use of mined spaces such as halite for the safe preservation of records or armaments stores within a controlled environment.