Scientists in China have begun drilling a hole over 10,000 meters (32,808 feet) deep into the Earth’s crust, a report says.
The drilling project, led by the country’s largest oil producer China National Petroleum Corp., would be among the deepest ever drilled.
The project began on Tuesday in the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, according to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua.
The drilling process will penetrate more than 10 layers of the Earth’s crust and reach the Cretaceous system, consisting of rock dating back up to 145 million years.
“The drilling project’s construction is comparable to a truck moving on two thin cables”, Sun Jinsheng said, a Chinese Academy of Engineering researcher.
Wang Chunsheng is a technical specialist involved in the project. He said drilling the borehole was an effort to expand human knowledge and explore unknown territories of Earth.
The project is expected to take 457 days and will provide data on the Earth’s internal structure while using deep underground drilling technologies, Bloomberg reported, citing China National Petroleum Corp.
In a statement, the state-owned oil refiner, Sinopec, said the goal was to drill through an “underground Mount Everest,” per Metro.
Everest in the Himalayas is the world’s highest peak at 29,031 feet.
In a 2021 speech addressing the nation’s top scientists, Chinese President Xi Jinping named deep Earth sciences one of four strategic frontiers to explore.
The initiative could be used to identify energy and mineral resources, and evaluate the risk of natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Despite its depth, this hole won’t be the world’s deepest man-made one. The deepest hole is still the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which reached 12,262 meters (40,230 feet) in 1989 after 20 years of drilling.
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