Chinese engineers have begun digging a new hole, very deep, far from the Earth’s crust, while the country intensifies its search for natural resources hidden tens of thousands of feet underground.
The China News Agency (Xinhua) stated that the hole will eventually reach 10,520 meters (34,514 feet) in the ground in the Sichuan Basin, in southwestern China.
The report stated that the region is a major place for gas production, and engineers are expected to find natural gas reserves there.
The announcement came just weeks after China began drilling another deep well, which is set to extend further into the ground with a planned depth of 11,100 meters (36,417 feet). The project is located in the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, northwest China.
If completed, they will be among the two deepest man-made wells in the world, however, they will not be the deepest.
The record currently belongs to the Kola Superdeep Borehole in northwest Russia, a Soviet-era scientific drilling project that took 20 years to complete, and reached 12,262 meters (40,229 feet).
These ultra-deep wells extend to a depth greater than the height of Mount Everest, which is about 8,800 meters (28,871 feet) long.
Humans have reached the moon, but “when it comes to exploring the earth in the depths beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet,” according to “CNN.”
Drilling deeper allows scientists to learn more about how the Earth formed, with the crust serving as a geological timeline or the formation of the world. But there are also strong business incentives, to tap the potentially lucrative energy reserves buried deep.
The two companies involved in drilling the Chinese wells are major state-owned oil conglomerates. Xinhua described the Xinjiang project as a “telescope” at the deepest end of the Earth, with a 2,000-ton design that aims to penetrate more than 10 continental layers.
The sources explained that the drilling rig can withstand 200 degrees Celsius and more than 1,700 times atmospheric pressure.