Exploring Earth's depths: What will we find if we keep digging down?

Have you ever considered the possibility of excavating directly through the Earth to reach a nation on the opposite side?

In fact, the deepest human-made hole is the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which reaches a depth of 12 kilometers but does not penetrate the Earth's crust. That depth is the equivalent of not getting all the way through the skin of an apple.

What would we find if we dug deeper?

You'd see fossils and microbes that are at least 2 billion years old; you'd see what the Earth looked like and how it evolved during that ancient time; you would see what the origin of life was like and how the climate changed; you would enter a primordial world that has never been discovered before.

How can we dig deeper?

The deep ocean floor is the closest place to the Earth's interior. It takes less distance to drill from the seafloor to the mantle than it does on land.

Therefore, deep-ocean drilling ships are the most efficient means for humans to penetrate the Earth's interior.

So far, the deepest sea hole in the world was drilled by a Japanese drilling ship, reaching 8 kilometers below sea level, but it still did not penetrate the Earth's crust.

On Nov. 17, China's first domestically built deep-ocean drilling vessel, named Mengxiang, meaning "dream" in English, was commissioned in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.

The ship is able to drill as far as 11,000 meters beneath the sea. This offers the potential to penetrate the Earth's crust, reach the mantle, and explore the most ancient mysteries of the planet.

This ship not only drills the deepest but also has the most powerful functions.

Freshly cores can begin to be studied on board the ship, which has been built with nine functional laboratories with a total area of more than 3,000 square meters to meet the needs of all disciplines of research in the marine field, such as microbiology, geophysics and other fields.

This ship is also capable of conducting deep-sea oil and gas exploration, further enriching the world's energy and mineral resource reserves.

Perhaps Mengxiang will fulfill man's dream of drilling through the earth's crust.

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