Oil company Sinopec last Tuesday began drilling that is expected to reach a depth of 10,000 meters in the Tarim Basin in northwest Xinjiang. China.

The hole will penetrate more than 10 layers of the earth’s crust, some of which contain rocks that are about 145 million years old.

“The complexity of building a drilling project can be compared to a big truck that moves on two thin steel cables,” Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Xinhua.

The project will provide data on the internal structure of the Earth, as well as test deep underground drilling technologies. Drilling is expected to take 457 days.

At the same time, these works can reveal energy resources and help assess the risks of environmental disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The drilling project could also give researchers insight into the unique geology of the basin, which is drained by three mountain ranges and is believed to have formed during the closure of the Paleo-Asian Ocean more than 200 million years ago.

The deepest man-made well on Earth is still the Russian Kola well, which in 1989 reached a depth of 12,262 meters after 20 years of drilling.

President Xi Jinping, in a speech to some of the country’s leading scientists in 2021, called for even more progress in understanding the interior of the Earth. Such work can identify mineral and energy resources and help assess the risks of environmental disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.