AAP FACTCHECK – A 1500-mile-long tunnel between the Vatican and the Hawaiian island of Maui has supposedly been discovered 15 kilometres below the earth’s surface, according to some on social media.
The tunnel was allegedly filled with gold worth “$43 million billion” that has now been “confiscated”.
The claim is false. No such tunnel has been found and the key facts of the claim do not stand up to scrutiny.
A million billion in the US numerical system (the most commonly used globally) is equal to 1000 trillion or one quadrillion (15 zeroes).
The World Gold Council estimates that about 213,000 tonnes of gold has been mined throughout history.
At time of writing, one tonne of gold is worth about $US80 million. The total value of all the gold ever mined is, therefore, about $US17 trillion.
The supposed discovery of $43 quadrillion worth of gold would equate to more than 200 times the amount of gold that has ever been mined.
While the posts do not specifically say the $43 million billion valuation is in US dollars, even in a much weaker currency such as the New Taiwan dollar, worth only three US cents, the supposed stockpile’s value would still exceed that of all the gold ever mined.
The outlandish claim has been made in several social media posts.
An August 12 post featuring supposed footage is captioned: “43 million billion dollars were confiscated from the tunnel connecting the Vatican to the island of Maui Hawaii, 1,500 miles long and 15km deep underground … This 43 quadrillion + the world’s existing gold”.
A similar post on X, formerly Twitter, claims “thousands of children and women” were also found in the tunnels – baseless claims about abused children being transported through secret tunnels are a common theme of right-wing conspiracies.
The claimed length and depth of the tunnel are also infeasibly overblown – no tunnel more than 100 miles in length has ever been built, and humans have never been able to dig further than 13km underground.
The post claims the tunnel stretches 1500 miles between the Vatican and Maui but the distance between the two places as the crow flies is actually about 8000 miles (about 13,000km).
No human-made tunnel has ever stretched beyond 165 kilometres.
The longest continuous tunnel in the world is New York’s 137km Delaware Aqueduct, which supplies drinking water to the city’s residents.
If a Vatican-Maui tunnel was built 15km underground, it would make it the deepest point ever reached by humans.
The true deepest, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, was drilled 12.2km below the surface in 1992, but the project was abandoned after underground temperatures reached 180C.
The deepest road tunnel on earth, Norway’s Eiksund road tunnel, is less than 300m underground.
The fake tunnel claim appears to be the latest incarnation of a previously debunked conspiracy theory that a 1500-mile tunnel filled with gold runs between the Vatican and Jerusalem.
The Verdict
False – The claim is inaccurate.
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