Published by: Vivek Dubey
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and China National Petroleum Corp have begun drilling the hole into the planet’s surface.
No, the deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which reached a depth of 12,262 meters (40,230 feet) in 1989, after 20 years of drilling.
The project will provide data on the Earth’s internal structure while also testing deep underground drilling technologies.
The drill will go through more than 10 layers of rock and reach the Cretaceous system in the Earth’s crust, which features rock dating back some 145 million years.
Drilling for what is set to be China’s deepest-ever borehole began on Tuesday, May 30, 2023.
China is drilling it’s deepest-ever borehole in the country’s oil-rich Xinjiang region.
The drilling is expected to take 457 days.
“The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables,” said Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called for deep Earth exploration in 2021 to identify mineral and energy resources and assess environmental disaster risks, according to Bloomberg’s latest report.