Jakarta –
Scientists in China dug a hole 10,000 meters deep into the Earth, the deepest hole ever dug in the country. Digging through 10 rock layers, the team hopes to reach rocks from the Cretaceous Age, a layer known as the Cretaceous System, which is up to 145 million years old.
Quoted from Bloomberg, the excavation project can be used to identify mineral resources as well as help assess environmental risks such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The hole, while very deep, would not be the deepest man-made hole on Earth.
This is because the deepest hole on Earth has become the nickname for the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. This pit digging project in Russia lasted from May 24, 1970, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is known that the depth of the hole reaches 11,034 meters below sea level.
The team found that the rocks deep beneath the Earth were much wetter than they had expected. Before the borehole found it, scientists thought water wouldn’t have penetrated the rock that deeply.
They also hope to find layers of basalt beneath continental granite, such as those found in oceanic crust. Instead, they found that beneath the igneous granite was metamorphic granite. Because the continental crust is all granite, this is evidence of plate tectonics, a theory that was only just starting to get accepted when they started drilling the boreholes.
Digging the Earth doesn’t always go smoothly. A team in America in the 1960s went 183 meters below the seafloor, passing 13 meters of basalt in the uppermost layers of the oceanic crust before the project was ultimately canceled due to mismanagement and financial problems. Putting these issues aside, the task was still a huge undertaking.
“The construction difficulty of a drilling project can be compared to that of a large truck traveling on two thin steel cables,” said Sun Jinsheng, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
To note, the Earth’s crust on land varies. On average, it is about 30 kilometers thick, and under the mountains it can be up to 100 kilometers. It seems that we are still very far from reaching the Earth’s mantle. So, hopefully this excavation project by China will run smoothly
Watch Video “Chinese Scientists Find a Giant Hole with a Depth of 192 meters“
(rns/afr)
2023-06-03 14:30:26
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