No Well Is Ordinary: Contemplating Openings Into the Deep Earth
Wells, springs, caves, oases—we've connected our lives to the Earth beneath our feet
Wells are more than just holes in the ground. They are portals, windows—connecting us to the deep, to history, to the unseen.
Humans have dug wells by hand or drilled for them. We’ve sought water, oil, and other resources from inside of the Earth.
Across cultures, wells have been sources of life, places of reflection, and even conduits to the underworld. Mythology and literature are rich with wells that sustain life, grant wisdom, fulfill our wishes, harbor spirits, or serve as passageways to another world. Yet sometimes, a well is just a well—or so we are told.
Take, for instance, the well in the original Final Fantasy game. If you interact with it, the game delivers a curious message:
"This is a well. You might think that there is something to it... But in fact it is just an ordinary well."
It’s a moment of playful irony. Players expect secrets hidden in the overlooked corners of a game world. Wells, in particular, may sometimes conceal treasures, lead to dungeons, or serve as passageways in a variety of games. But this one in Final Fantasy resists the allure—insisting upon its own ordinariness. If a well is just a well, why acknowledge it at all?
This tension—between the mundane and the profound—mirrors our real-world relationship with wells and other openings into the Earth. A well is both functional and symbolic: a vertical path through time, revealing ancient sediments, fossilized life, and perhaps water—the lifeblood of civilization.
Connecting the Depths Below Us to Those Within Us
The idea that wells and other openings in the Earth—like caves and springs—lead to something beyond us is ancient.
Norse mythology tells of Mímisbrunnr, the well of Mimir, where Odin sacrificed an eye to gain insight into the cosmos. This well sits among the roots of Yggdrasil and serves as a container of knowledge and wisdom. One can see connections to the importance of water as well as the allure of the mysterious in tales of the well.
In Greek myth, oracles communed with the underworld through sacred springs and fissures in the Earth, their visions rising like vapors from the deep. One such site of prognostication, the Oracle of Aornum, has direct connection to the innards of the Earth through the cave, Charonium (“Charon’s Cave”), which gave forth poisonous vapours and was believed to be an entrance/connection to Hades. In one version of the myth of Orpheus attempting to recover his wife, Euryduce, from Hades, he does so by traveling to this opening in the Earth.
The necessity for freshwater has connected many people through time to springs and wells. The Kuruvungna Sacred Springs, also called the Tongva Sacred Springs, located on the campus of University High School in Los Angeles in California were used by the Gabrieleno Tongva people as a source of natural fresh water since at least the 5th century BCE. The Zamzam well in Mecca is connected to the spiritual observances of the Hajj, the sacred pilgrimage in Islam. In Zhejiang Province in China, near the base of Wengjia Mountain, a deep well that has long been known as the “Old Dragon Well” was a source of freshwater and also a dragon myth, leading it to become the namesake of Dragon Well Tea.
A large number of stepwells were built in India over the past millennium to make the act of collecting and carrying water easier. But the sites are also known for their architectural intricacy and aesthetic value, which is honestly not all that surprising given the depth of spiritual and mystical wonderment that has come from India.
And the creation of wells is only one way we engage with the depths. Natural openings of the Earth offer their own invitations into the underworld.
Caves have long been places of mystery, shelter, and ceremony.
The famed Chauvet and Lascaux caves of France house some of humanity’s oldest known art, painted in the flickering light of torches on cavern walls many millennia ago. I was fortunate myself to explore El Castillo cave in Spain in 2012, just after a publication showed that the cave paintings there were over 40,000 years old, and stood in the presence of artwork created by our ancestors so very long ago. Cave art discovered on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi has been dated to somewhere around 51,200 years ago. And in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, researchers discovered an ancient drawing that has been dated to 73,000 years ago. We took to caves perhaps as shelter and sites for ceremony and also to create and to preserve our thoughts.
Even now, we feel something primordial when stepping into the cool, silent void of a deep cave. For those of us who aren’t claustrophobic, exploring caves and lava tubes and other openings into the Earth bring excitement and connection to the solid ground.
Even the concept of Hell—whether it stinks of sulfur, as Salomon Kroonenberg explores in Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur, or appears as a multilayer entry into the underworld as Dante envisioned—often finds its roots in geology. The heat, the fumes, the churning fire from below—these were not abstract ideas but tangible experiences for ancient people living near volcanic vents, sulfurous springs, and mysterious caves.
Wherever the Earth opens, we imagine stories pouring forth.
Wells, Springs, and Caves in the Modern Imagination
This mythic quality of wells and springs and caves extends into modern storytelling.
In the game Uncharted 3, Nathan Drake encounters a well in the Rub' al Khali desert—unfortunately the well itself has long since dried up.
Like many explorers, T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) was drawn to wells in the desert, understanding that they were more than sources of water; they were places of power, contested ground in the struggle for survival and control. In the unforgiving landscape of the desert, a well or an oasis could mean the difference between life and death, between conquest and retreat.
The desert oasis itself connects to concepts of refuge and renewal. We see oases in a variety of our stories, sometimes playing lesser roles and sometimes being a key component of the narrative.
Wells and oases and springs can serve as connecting points of stories and also form a part of the symbolism. In the film The Ring (2002), we find a well serving as a conduit between the vengeful spirit of a young girl and the living world, symbolizing hidden truths and unresolved traumas—and, notably, the view of the ring from the bottom of the well looking up delivers a lot of the symbolism of the film. Likewise, in Guillermo del Toro's dark fantasy Pan's Labyrinth (2006), a central character encounters a well-like structure that leads her into a mythical underworld, representing a portal to another realm and a journey into the self.
An epic representation of the power of connecting to underground water can be found in the recent Mad Max films. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) both show the area called The Citadel, the home fortress of the villain Immortan Joe. The Citadel is a cluster of rock towers that overlie a freshwater aquifer. Using a system of pumps and pipes controls the flow of the water—and in the drought ridden desert of “the wasteland” in the dystopian future of the Mad Max franchise, having control of flowing fresh water also is a source of power. Similarly, we find in these films the concept of the "Green Place", being a fertile land with abundant springs, representing hope and survival in a desolate world (and, sadly, later we find it to have dried up and died). The scarcity of water underscores its value and the desperation it incites.
\Of course, we also have caves depicted in film, novels, and video games in various ways. One of my favorite horror films set in a cave is The Descent (2005). This film follows a group of women exploring an uncharted cave system, only to encounter deadly creatures adapted to the darkness. The cave setting amplifies themes of claustrophobia, the unknown, and primal fears.
There’s even a list of Best Books with Underground Setting that you can find on Goodreads if you’re looking for reading some books set in caves and underground realms.
Drilling, Fracking, and Our Changing Relationships with the Subsurface
Of course, wells are not just about water.
We have spent centuries perfecting the art of drilling into the Earth, extracting water but also oil, gas, and minerals from its depths. But the methods have changed.
Thousands of years ago, people began collecting oil, bitumen, and coal from shallow upwellings and openings in the Earth. Such substances were used for building materials, for burning for heat and light, for medicines, and more.
The first commercial oil well in the U.S. was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859 by Colonel Edwin L. Drake (and called the Drake Well). While it’s often argued that this event launched the global oil and gas industry, the first mechanically drilled oil well in the world was in 1846 the modern Bibi-Heybat Oil Field in Azerbaijan.
Fracking—hydraulic fracturing—has reshaped our modern interaction with the underground, forcing open rock formations that were once impermeable, tapping resources at deeper and more difficult levels than our earliest oil wells can achieve.
Fracking has deepened our entanglement with the Earth’s interior, but at what cost? Unlike an old hand-dug well, which one could stand beside and gaze into, fracking sites are sealed, hidden, their impacts largely invisible until something cracks—water contamination, seismic activity, or the slow depletion of an underground reservoir. While our modern civilization relies on fossil fuels for our energy and living needs, fracking is arguably an environmental disaster.
Life Underground: Burrows, the Deep Hot Biosphere, and the Hidden Earth
We humans are not the only ones who dig.
Many organisms burrow, creating their own tunnels into the Earth. From earthworms aerating the soil to prairie dogs carving networks of underground cities, life is drawn downward as much as it is drawn upward.
One of my favorites of the extinct megafauna to think about are the giant ground sloths. Some of them being about as large as modern elephants, some of them in South America dug burrows so large that preserved examples today are large enough for people to walk into.
And then there is life far deeper than we once imagined.
The Deep Hot Biosphere—a term popularized by Thomas Gold—describes a hidden microbial ecosystem thriving miles below the surface, sustained by chemical energy rather than sunlight. These organisms—living within rocks, feeding on hydrogen and methane or perhaps even fueled by radioactive decay—challenge our understanding of the boundaries of life. They are, in a way, the biological equivalent of wells: pathways into unseen worlds.
Thinking about wells and springs and caves as well as the many other creatures of our planet that have carved burrows and tunnels into the Earth—or even make the deep subsurface their home—also makes me wonder about alien worlds. Might there be alien biospheres that have taken tunneling to a great extent? Maybe there are worlds with vast extensive networks of tunnels that run deep into the ground. Perhaps there are alien civilizations that have an utterly different connection to the subsurface.
The Call of the Deep
Whether in mythology, video games, or the geologic record, wells and other openings into the Earth are captivating.
They are reminders of our connection to the unseen depths, to the lifeblood of water, to the stories we tell about what lies below.
Even when a game like Final Fantasy insists that a well is “just an ordinary well,” we know better.
There is no such thing as an ordinary well. Every well, every cave, every spring, every burrow is a passage to something deeper. Deeper within the world as well as within ourselves. The question is whether we are willing to peer inside.
This piece is inspired by an older post from A Cosmobiologist’s Dream that I wrote in 2016. I recall fondly that I had been doing a replay of the original Final Fantasy on an emulator online while I was also working on writing up my PhD dissertation and then came upon the “ordinary well”. And that got me thinking about the importance of wells and their connections to a variety of openings into the Earth.