CNN by Chris Lau 7/21/2023
Chinese engineers on Thursday broke ground on a new super deep borehole that will burrow far into the Earth’s crust as the country steps up its search for natural resources hidden tens of thousands of feet underground.
The hole will eventually reach 10,520 meters (34,514 feet) into the ground at the Sichuan Basin in southwest China, according to state-run news agency Xinhua. The region is a major area for gas production and engineers expected to find a natural gas reserve there, the report said.
The announcement came just weeks after China began drilling another super deep borehole which is slated to extend even further into the Earth with a planned depth of 11,100-meter (36,417 feet). That project is located at the Tarim Basin in China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang.
If completed, they would be among two of the deepest human-made boreholes in the world. However they would not be deepest.
That record currently lies with the now defunct Kola Superdeep Borehole in north-west Russia, a Soviet-era scientific drilling project that took 20 years to complete and went to 12,262 meters (40,229 feet).
These ultradeep holes stretch greater than Mount Everest measuring from top to bottom, which is about 8,800 meters (28,871 feet) tall.
Humans have reached the moon but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet.
More:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/china/china-second-superdeep-borehole-intl-hnk/index.html
