There are many ways scientists can find out What’s wrong below the surface—like measuring seismic waves propagating underground—but maybe nothing beats a really, really, really deep hole.
According to China’s state administration Xinhua News AgencyWork is currently underway to dig an 11,100 meter (36,417 ft) well Taklamakan Desert in northwest China. That’s the equivalent of more than 33 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other.
That’s not quite the deepest thing humans have ever experienced. The new excavation will not exceed the 12,262 meter (40,230 ft) route. Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia (which has now been abandoned) or the 12,290 meters (40,323 ft) BD-04A oil well in Russia Al Shaheen Oil Field in Qatar – but it’s getting closer.
Chinese scientists hope the hole will greatly improve our understanding of Earth’s deep geology, while also searching for oil and gas reserves as drilling advances to ever deeper depths.
frameborder=”0″allow=”accelerometer; auto play; clipboard writing; encrypted media; Gyroscope; picture in picture; web share”allowfullscreen>
China hasn’t revealed much more about the details of the well or the type of experimentation and analysis that will be conducted once it’s completed, but it could help verify what we think we know about Earth’s crust. continental crust goes to an average depth of about 30 kilometers (over 18 miles), so this hole does not reach the Earth’s mantle.
As you can imagine, it’s a huge engineering undertaking. The hole will not be complete for more than a year and around 2,000 tonnes of equipment and instrumentation – including drill bits and drill pipe – have been brought in for the job.
For an idea of how difficult drilling to these depths can be, see the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Work on this project began in May 1970 and continued through 1994 with a total of five wells excavated due to mechanical failures and failures.
However, it turned out to be very useful: scientists found water and hydrogen in quantities and depths they did not expect. Another interesting discovery was the presence of microscopic plankton fossils about 6,000 meters (19,685 ft) below the surface.
“The construction difficulties of the drilling project can be compared to a large truck traveling on two thin steel cables,” said scientist Sun Jinsheng of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xinhua.
The equipment used to create the well has to withstand temperatures of up to 200 degrees Celsius and air pressure around 1,300 times higher than at the surface.
When complete, the new hole in China is expected to go back through 10 continental strata — the layers of sedimentary rock that span entire continents — in about 450 days the chalk systemformed 145 million years ago.
