The deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Russian Kola superdeep borehole.
Chinese scientists have begun drilling a 10,000-metre (32,808 ft) hole into the Earth’s crust, as the world’s second-largest economy searches for new frontiers above and below the planet’s surface.
Drilling for China’s deepest borehole ever began in the country’s oil-rich Xinjiang region on Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Earlier in the morning, China launched its first civilian astronaut into space from the Gobi Desert.
The narrow shaft in the ground will penetrate more than 10 continental strata, or layers of rock, and reach the Cretaceous system in Earth’s crust, which features rock dating back 145 million years, according to the report.
“The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a large truck running on two thin steel cables,” Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Xinhua.
President Xi Jinping called for more progress in deep Earth exploration in 2021 in a speech addressing some of the country’s leading scientists. Such work can identify mineral and energy resources and help assess the risks of environmental disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
The deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Russian Kola superdeep borehole, which reached a depth of 12,262 m (40,230 ft) in 1989 after 20 years of drilling.
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