What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?
Nothing of great interest. That's a tiny scratch in the surface of the planet, less than 1% of the radius.
On the other hand although we lack the technology you'd need to destroy the damp rock where we live, we only live on some dry-ish outside surface parts of the rock, and we could trash that part and drive ourselves extinct. "Oops"
conveniently there is a xkcd for that too https://xkcd.com/1330/
There's a documentary about that, in the form of the game 'Motherload'
https://www.crazygames.com/game/motherload