China is digging a 10,000 meter hole into the Earth to reach the Cretaceous system.
Scientists in China have begun digging a 10,000-meter hole into the Earth, the deepest ever attempted in the country.
By digging through ten layers of rock, the team in China hopes to reach rocks from the Cretaceous period, the layer known as the Cretaceous System, which dates back up to 145 million years. China’s project, which started recently, could be used to identify mineral resources as well as help assess environmental risks such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, according to Bloomberg.
China wants to dig a hole in the Earth to discover Cretaceous rocks
The hole, while impressively deep, will not be the deepest man-made hole on Earth. That title goes to the Kola Superdeep Drilling, on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. The project, which ran from 24 May 1970 until just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw the deepest branch of the hole reach 11,034 meters below sea level.
The team found that the rocks deep beneath the Earth were much wetter than they expected. Before drilling found it, scientists thought water wouldn’t penetrate that deep into the rock. They also expected to find a layer of basalt beneath the continent’s granite, as this is what was found in the oceanic crust. Instead, they discovered that beneath the igneous granite was metamorphic granite. Because the continental crust was granite all the way down, this was evidence for plate tectonics, a theory that only recently began to be accepted when they started drilling the borehole.
Digging into the Earth doesn’t always go so well. An American team in the 1960s reached 183 meters below the sea floor, passing through 13 meters of basalt in the upper layer of the oceanic crust, before the project was canceled due to mismanagement and financial problems.
