Next Big Future June 11, 2023
China has been exploring the deep Earth for many years. China has started drilling a 6.2 mile (10,000 meters) superdeep borehole into the Earth’s crust in China’s large oil-bearing basin – the Tarim Basin of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In May 2023 they completed building a 12,000-tonne offshore drilling rig to mine the geological reserves of natural gas. In the deep hole drilling will penetrate over 10 continental strata or layers of rock formation, go beyond the Cretaceous system, a series of layered rocks below the oldest tertiary deposits and above the Jurassic system, which ended about 145.5 million years ago. The deepest artificial hole on Earth is the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which took 20 years to reach a depth of 12,262 meters (40,230 feet) in 1989. China plans to dig its new hold in less than two years… read more.