This project has been started after the call of Chinese President Xi Jinping in which he asked to find out the minerals hidden deep inside the earth and assess the risk of natural disaster. It is being told that this entire hole will be 10 thousand meters or 32,808 feet deep in the upper layer of the earth. Why China is drilling so deeply, no one is sure about its intention. The Chinese team hopes to reach the rock of the Cretaceous period through this hole.
The world’s deepest hole in Russia’s Kola Peninsula
The Cretaceous layer is called the Cretaceous System which is 145 million years old. According to a Bloomberg report, China will not only be able to identify minerals through this project but also assess environmental hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This hole may be 10 km deep but it is not the deepest in the world. The world’s deepest hole has been made in the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. Its Kola is called superdeep borehole. This hole is 11,034 meters deep from the surface of the sea.
What the Kola crew found was much wetter than they had expected. Until this borehole, scientists believed that water could not go so far down the rock. Digging so deep into the earth hasn’t always been easy. In the 1960s, an American team excavated 600 feet below the sea surface, but later this project had to be canceled due to mismanagement and financial crisis. For this reason, Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, compared it to a truck running on a steel wire.
China is doing many feats one after the other
The upper layer of the Earth is believed to be up to 30 km thick. However, in mountainous areas it can be up to 100 km thick. Chinese technical expert Wang Chunsheng said that digging a borewell at a depth of 10,000 meters is a very bold attempt through which the unknown area of the earth can be explored. The drilling has begun at a time when China has sent its first civilian to the space station and deployed a 12,000 ton offshore drilling rig to tap natural gas reserves. In the latest excavation, China will try to put pipes inside the ground in the Tarim Basin.