Scientists in China have begun digging a hole some 32,808 feet into the Earth, the deepest ever attempted in the country.
By digging through 10 layers of rock, the team hopes to reach rocks from the Cretaceous Period, the layer known as the Cretaceous System, which dates back 145 million years.
The project, which began on Tuesday, according to china.org.cn, could be used to identify mineral resources and help assess environmental risks such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, according to Bloomberg.
The hole, while impressively deep, will not be the deepest human-made hole on Earth.
That title goes to the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. The project, which spanned from May 24, 1970, until just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw the deepest branch of the hole reach 36,201 feet below sea level.
The team found that the rocks deep within the Earth were much wetter than they expected. Before the well found it, scientists had thought that the water would not penetrate the rock as deeply.
They also expected to find a layer of basalt beneath the mainland’s granite, as this is what was found in oceanic crust, according to earthdate.org.
Instead, they found that beneath the igneous granite was metamorphic granite. Since the continental crust was granite all the way down, this was evidence for plate tectonics, a theory that had only recently begun to be accepted when they started digging the well.
It should be noted that the earth’s crust is variable. On average, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), it is about 19 miles thick, although under mountain ranges it can be up to 62 miles, so we’re a long way from reaching the Earth’s mantle.
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