China has mysteriously started digging a 10,000m hole

China — currently home to the world’s second-largest economy — began drilling what will become its deepest ever borehole on Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

It’s not entirely clear what the hole’s purpose is, but the fact that it’s being dug in the oil-rich region of Xinjiang may provide a clue.

The narrow shaft will penetrate more than 10 layers of rock and reach the cretaceous system in the Earth’s crust, according to the report. It will break through rock that is about 145 million years old — far older than man’s first appearance on Earth, which only occurred about five to seven million years ago.

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

On the same day that digging began, China sent its first civilian astronaut into space from the Gobi Desert, as the country desperately tries to establish new frontiers to become the world’s largest economy.

According to China’s National Petroleum Corp, which is spearheading the project, the hole will provide data on the Earth’s internal structure while also testing deep underground drilling technologies.

The drill, which has a design depth of over 11,000 metres, comprises of drill bits and drill pipes that will force their way through the tough Tarim Basin, in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

It is expected to take 457 days for the hole to reach full depth.

President Xi Jinping called for greater progress in deep Earth exploration in a speech addressing some of the nation’s leading scientists in 2021. Such work can identify mineral and energy resources and help assess the risks of environmental disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

China’s hole will not quite surpass the world’s deepest man-made hole, which is the Kola Superdeep Hole, began by the Soviet Union and which reached a depth of 12,262 metres in 1989 after 20 years of drilling.