Scientists in China have begun digging a hole 10,000 meters deep, the deepest hole ever attempted in the country.

By excavating 10 layers of rock, the team hopes to reach rocks from the Cretaceous period, a 145-million-year-old layer known as the Cretaceous System. According to this BloombergThe recently launched project can be used to determine mineral resources as well as to evaluate environmental risks such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Despite its impressive depth, this hole will not be the deepest man-made hole on Earth. This name is given to the Kola ultra-deep well on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. In the project, which lasted from May 24, 1970 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was seen that the deepest branch of the pit reached 11,034 meters below sea level.

The team discovered that rocks deep underground were much wetter than expected. Before the well was discovered, scientists thought that water could not penetrate that deep into the rock. They also expected to find a layer of basalt found in the oceanic crust beneath the continent’s granite. Instead, they discovered that beneath the igneous granite was a metamorphic granite. The fact that the continental crust was granitic downwards was evidence of plate tectonics; This theory began to be accepted only recently, with the opening of the well.

Digging doesn’t always go so smoothly. In the 1960s, an American team passed through 13 meters of basalt in the upper layer of the ocean crust and reached 183 meters below the seafloor, before the project was canceled due to mismanagement and financial problems. Despite these problems, this is still a big deal.

“The complexity of building a drilling project can be compared to a large truck moving on two thin steel cables,” Chinese Academy of Engineering academic Sun Jinsheng told Xinhua. Source