Scientists have set a record off the coast of Japan when it comes to drilling in the bottom of the deep sea. A research vessel extracted a layer of about 37 meters from the seabed at a depth of 8 kilometers.
That is almost a kilometer deeper than the team that set the previous record in 1978 with drilling in the Mariana Trench, the deep-sea canyon located to the east of the Philippines.
Almost three hours on the road
The milestone was already reached on Friday last week, the BBC, but the research team consisting of European and Japanese scientists only just reported the news this week. Expedition leader Michael Strasser writes in it expeditieblog not being able to wait to analyze the material “from the bottom of the deep”.
It took nearly three hours for the 40-meter-long drill to descend to the affected seabed in the deep Japan Trench, east of the Asian country. The sediment comes from the place where the epicenter of an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1 was measured in 2011.
Deepest borehole ever
That quake triggered a tsunami that resulted in nearly 20,000 casualties and devastated Japan’s east coast, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Scientists hope to gain more insight into earthquakes from the past with the layers from the deep-sea floor.
The deepest borehole still remains the one that Russia drilled in the Kola peninsula, in the northwest of the country. In 1989, researchers there reached a depth of more than 12 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. Drilling was eventually stopped because, among other things, the temperature became too high for the drill head; it is about 180 degrees at the bottom of the hole.
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