China has started drilling one of the deepest holes in recent history; at 33,000 ft deep, what are they looking for?

They started drilling the hole in Xinjiang’s Muslim area on Tuesday, and plan to penetrate more than 10 continental strata, or layers of rock, and reach areas of the earth’s crust that they say reach back 145 million years.

What is the purpose of such a deep hole? Many people have heard of “digging all the way to China,” but who has heard of the Chinese digging to find somewhere or something else?

China’s president, Xi Jinping, is wanting re-invigorate the spirit of exploration to see what is under the earth’s top layers.  He has called on all the nation’s scientists to explore the earth’s crust, perhaps looking to identify new mineral and energy resources or help assess the risks of environmental disasters, such as earthquakes and volcano eruptions, or maybe he really is looking for hell.

The deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Russian Kola Super-deep Borehole, which reached a depth of 40,230 feet, after drilling for 20 years.