• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Why Is China Digging A 10,000-Meter Hole Down To The Cretaceous System?

October 11, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Earlier this year, China began digging a 10,000-meter (32,808-foot) hole into the Earth, the deepest ever attempted in the country.

Digging down through 10 layers of rock, the team hopes to reach rocks from the Cretaceous Period, the layer known as the Cretaceous System, which dates back up to 145 million years. While cool in its own right, there has been some speculation around the main purpose of the drilling, though the answer is fairly transparent.

Advertisement

The project could be used to identify mineral resources, as well as help assess environmental risks like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, according to Bloomberg. 

However, Quanyou Liu from Peking University in China, who is familiar with the project, told New Scientist that the drilling could reach back even further into the past, going down to the Cambrian period 541 to 485 million years ago. Here, in the Tarim Basin, there may be oil to be found. According to Liu, the purpose of the drilling is “to discover whether there is still the occurrence of oil and gas in the ultra-deep depths.”

This would make sense, given that the project is being led by China’s National Petroleum Corp. According to the company, the hole will test new drilling technologies, as well as help us learn about the internal structure of the Earth.

The hole, while impressively deep, will not be the deepest human-made hole on Earth. That title goes to the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. The project, which spanned from May 24, 1970, to just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw the deepest branch of the hole reach 11,034 meters (36,201 feet) below sea level. 

Advertisement

The team found that the rocks deep below the Earth were a lot wetter than they were expecting. Before the borehole found it, scientists had thought the water would not permeate the rock so deeply. They had also been expecting to find a layer of basalt beneath the continent’s granite, as this is what was found in the oceanic crust. Instead, they found that beneath the igneous granite was metamorphic granite. Since the continental crust was granite all the way down, this was evidence for plate tectonics, a theory that had only recently begun to be accepted when they began digging the borehole.



Digging into the Earth doesn’t always go so smoothly. An American team in the 1960s reached 183 meters (600 feet) beneath the seafloor, going through 13 meters (43 feet) of basalt in the uppermost layer of oceanic crust before the project was canceled due to mismanagement and financial troubles. With these problems aside, the task is still a huge undertaking.

“The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables,” Sun Jinsheng, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Chinese state news agency Xinhua of the latest Chinese efforts.

While exciting, mantle fans await disappointment. The Earth’s crust, on land, is variable. On average it is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) thick, though under mountain ranges it can reach as much as 100 kilometers (62 miles). We are far from reaching the Earth’s mantle and tasting the forbidden goo.

Advertisement

An earlier version of this article was published in May 2023.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Analysis-Diverse boards to pick the next Boston and Dallas Fed bank chiefs
  4. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It

Source Link: Why Is China Digging A 10,000-Meter Hole Down To The Cretaceous System?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Have You Seen This Snake? Florida Wants Your Help Finding Rare Species Seen Once In 50 Years
  • Plague Confirmed In Lake Tahoe Area For First Time In 5 Years, California Officials Say
  • Supergiant Star Spotted Blowing Milky Way’s Largest Bubble Of Its Kind, Surprising Astronomers
  • Game Theory Promised To Explain Human Decisions. Did It?
  • Genes, Hormones, And Hairstyling – Here Are Some Causes Of Hair Loss You Might Not Have Heard Of
  • Answer To 30-Year-Old Mystery Code Embedded In The Kryptos CIA Sculpture To Be Sold At Auction
  • Merry Mice: Human Brain Cells Transplanted Into Mice Reduce Anxiety And Depression
  • Asteroid-Bound NASA Mission Snaps Earth-Moon Portrait From 290 Million Kilometers Away
  • Forget State Mammals – Some States Have Official Dinosaurs, And They’re Awesome
  • Female Jumping Spiders Of Two Species Prefer The Sexy Red Males Of One, Leading To Hybridization
  • Why Is It So Difficult To Find New Moons In The Solar System?
  • New “Oxygen-Breathing” Crystal Could Recharge Fuel Cells And More
  • Some Gut Bacteria Cause Insomnia While Others Protect Against It, 400,000-Person Study Argues
  • Neanderthals And Homo Sapiens Got It On 100,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought
  • “Womb Of The Universe”: Native American Tribal Elders Help Archaeologists Decipher Ancient Rock Art In Missouri Cave
  • 16,000-Year-Old Paintings Suggest Prehistoric Humans Risked Their Lives To Enter “Shaman Training Cave”
  • Final Gasps Of A Dying Star Seen Through A Record-Breaking 130 Years Of Data
  • COVID-19 “Vaccine Alternative” Injection Could Be On Fast-Track To Approval From FDA
  • New Jersey Officials Investigate Possible First Locally Acquired Malaria Case Since 1991
  • First-of-Its-Kind Bright Orange Nurse Shark Recorded Off Costa Rica Makes History
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version