by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
Every now and then I get a really odd little story that catches my attention for its oddity and its “high octane speculatability” (if I may be permitted to coin that term). This little article that was shared by N. is one of them:
Why Is China Digging 33,000 Feet Into The Earth’s Crust?
The headline of this article says it all, why indeed is China sponsoring a dig six miles down into the Earth’s crust? Some of the answers, contained in the article, strike me as the usual practice in such cases: “create a plausible narrative to disguise the real motivations and possibilities”:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Chinese scientists broke ground Tuesday on a planned 10,000-meter (32,808) foot hole into the Earth’s crust – the country’s deepest ever borehole according to Bloomberg, citing the Xinhua state-run news agency.
The shaft will penetrate over 10 continental strata, or layers of rock, and will reach the cretaceous system in the earth’s crust which dates back some 145 million years. The project will provide data on Earth’s internal structure, as well as prove up underground drilling technologies, according to China’s National Petroleum Corp., which is in charge of the 457-day project.
“The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables,” said Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in a statement to Xinhua.
President Xi Jinping called for greater progress in deep Earth exploration in a speech addressing some of the nation’s leading scientists in 2021. -Bloomberg
The current record for a hole bored into the earth is the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which has a recorded depth of 40,230 feet (12,262 meters) and was completed in 1989 after 20 years of drilling.
For reference, the earth’s crust is an average of 30 km (19 miles) thick.
And that is the hole article (pardon my pun, but I simply couldn’t resist).
So China is boring a hole into the Earth about six miles deep, and Russia has already one over seven miles deep some time ago on the Kola peninsula near the Arctic circle. The question is: why?
Here the public explanations make a lot of sense: to improve deep drilling techniques, enhance our geophysical knowledge of the Earth’s crust and its geophysical properties. But once we get to that last bit, that’s where the public explanations leave off, and my high octane speculation motor clicks into overdrive. Such holes would provide an opportunity to lower gear designed to take careful measurements of how the crust behaves during p-waves of compression and rarefaction measuring through it, and how the differing compositions of the crust would impact such waves, geophysical knowledge that would be quite important to a variety of uses: signal propagation through the Earth, deep penetration tomography development and technology, earthquake prediction (and design!), and other types of weaponization possibilities.
What captured my attention here, however, was the reference to a speech by Chinese leader Xi Jinping calling for “greater progress in deep Earth exploration.” There can be little doubt that there is vast wealth and resources to be tapped down there, right under our feet. I would venture to offer the possibility, however, that there are exotic forms of common minerals down there, exotic forms brought about perhaps by the extreme conditions under which they have been formed. One might be able to run computer programs predicting the possible types of minerals one would find, and whether or not their lattice structure would remain stable under surface conditions, and so on. But this is my point, and perhaps the hidden motivation for Mr. Xi’s exploration comment: we know little beyond what geophysical theory has told us about the interior of our beautiful planet. The movie Core starring Aaron Eckhardt hints at this possibility to some extent, but only hints. We won’t actually know until we go down, and see.
And that brings me to an “extension” of my high octane speculation: drilling such deep bores is, suspect, a necessary step in the technology tree to something much more ambitious: actual deep Earth construction, and by extension of that hypothesis, exploration and mining. I come from a state were there was once a large operating gold mine which closed only a few decades ago after the mine was no longer profitable to operate. What was left was a large hole in the ground, and shafts about a mile and a half deep. As mines, go, it’s fairly deep.
