The Chinese region of Xinjiang was flooded with machines, as the project began in the last week of May, within the framework of which the Chinese state wants to dig a hole of ten thousand meters in one of the largest deserts of the country. In theory, the purpose of the drilling is to identify exactly which rocks are under the country, and to prepare surveys that can be used during environmental hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
In addition, the country is also confident that the excavations of more than ten layers of rock will open a way to the Cretaceous period as well, because at this depth they can find artifacts from as many as 145 million years ago.
Not everything is so simple
As is bloomberg The report revealed that the drilling workers were actually surprised in the early days, because the underground rock was wetter than they expected. The project scientists believed that the water did not penetrate deeply into the rock, but practice proved them wrong.
The researchers also hoped to find basalt under the granite layer under the continent – they deduced this from the fact that such a structure was observed in the oceanic crust – but practice refuted them again, because there is only more under the igneous granite, this metamorphic granite has already been found in this case .
The difficulty of the drilling project can best be compared to a truck traveling on two long, thin cables rather than a stable road.
Sun Qinsheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the state-run Chinese News Agency about the drilling, adding that the project is expected to last 457 days.
But how much is that much?
Although drilling ten thousand meters deep may seem at first glance an extremely large number, it is nowhere near as deep as humanity has reached so far. One of the largest attempts was a project called Super-Deep Drilling on the Kola Peninsula, which was a deep drilling by a scientific researcher on the Kola Peninsula in the former Soviet Union.
According to the original plan, the goal of the deep drilling was to reach a depth of fifteen thousand meters, which would have been drilled through the Mohorovičić interface, which borders the earth’s crust and mantle. The excavation site was chosen ten kilometers west of the city of Zabolgarniye in the Murmansk region, because, according to measurements, the Mohorović surface was at its lowest depth here.
Drilling finally began on May 24, 1970, first with the Uralmas-4E and then with the Uralmas-15000 drilling rig. The deepest drill, marked SzG-3, reached a depth of 12,262 meters 19 years later, in 1989, but the original plan was not realized. Despite all this, the SzG-3 was still the deepest man-made deep well until 2008 – until the 12,290-meter-diameter Maersk BD-04A oil well was completed.
How far is the center of the earth from this? In short and precise: very. Our planet is made up of five distinct layers, which are the following from the outside to the inside:
- Shell,
- topcoat,
- lower mantle,
- outer core,
- The inner core.
Just how small we are on Earth’s surface is perfectly illustrated by the fact that only the crust – roughly the same as that of an apple – is underground 30–70 kilometers. The minimum depth of the mantle is about 2,891 kilometers, and its mineral content increases as it decreases, until it finally reaches the outer core, or primary mantle, which is located around the core of the Earth, that is, the center of the Earth.
