China has started digging an 11,100-meter deep borehole

China started digging an 11,100-meter-deep borehole late in May.

Furthermore, the borehole is located in China’s largest desert, the Taklimakan Desert, and drilling started on May 30.

The project aims to provide insights about the Earth’s internal structure, test deep drilling technology, and search for oil and gas reserves.

It is expected that the drilling process is going to last about 457 days, while the borehole itself is going to pass through 10 continental strata, before reaching the Cretaceous System. For this to be possible, 2,000 tons of equipment have been brought on-site.

However, this is not expected to be an easy task. Sun Jinsheng, a scientist of the Chinese Academy of Engineering characteristically stated that “the construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables”.

Characteristically, the drilling equipment will have to encounter temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius and great pressure conditions.

It is worth noting that, despite its magnitude, this is not going to be the world’s deepest borehole ever dug. This title belongs to the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which took about twenty years of drilling, starting in 1970, and needed five borehole attempts to be excavated in total before reaching a depth of 12,262 meters.