China has unveiled its ‘best in class’ ocean drilling vessel named ‘Mengxiang’ to penetrate the earth’s crust and extract samples from the mantle. As per reports, the ultra-deep ocean drilling vessel Mengxiang, whose name means ‘dream’ in Mandarin, has been built to carry out one of humanity’s most challenging missions till date, to drill through the earth’s outer crust.
As per a report in SCMP, Mengxiang has been built by China Geological Survey, in collaboration with over 150 research institutes and companies. It measures 179 meters in length and 32.8 meters in width. It can carry over 33,000 tons of cargo and can travel over 15,000 nautical miles for 120 days between port calls.
The ship has been built to withstand the strongest of tropical cyclones, and travel anywhere in the global waters. It is fitted with drilling equipment that is reportedly ‘best in class’, with capabilities to drill up to 11,000 metres, that is 6.8 miles below the earth’s surface.
#Gravitas | China is trying to drill through the Earth's crust and reach the mantle.
— WION (@WIONews) December 29, 2023
Beijing has unveiled a ship named Mengxiang that has been tasked with drilling through the Earth's surface.
Why does China want to reach the mantle?
How risky is this endeavour?
Can it endanger… pic.twitter.com/Ce90Iwkzm7
Why does China want to reach the mantle
The outer crust, mantle and the core constitute the 3 main layers of the planet Earth. So far, human activity has been limited to outer levels of the crust, which has an average thickness of 15,000 meters or roughly 15 km, a tiny thickness compared to the 6371 km radius of the earth.
A ‘boundary’ of sorts, called the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or just ‘Moho’ separates the crust from the mantle. No human endeavor so far has been able to breach the Moho. The Moho lies about 7000 meters below the ocean’s surface at certain locations, and on average at a depth of 40,000 meters from ground level on dry land. In the 1960s, American scientists had tried to beach the Moho, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
China has stated that it wants to understand plate tectonics, ocean crust evolution, and seabed resources. Li Chun Feng, a marine geologist from the Zhejiang University told SCMP that studying the ocean floor has revealed startling facts about the earth’s climatic history. For example, exploration of the seabed in the Mediterranean Sea revealed that the entire area was a dry salt desert about 6 million years ago. And the Arctic Ocean was a warm freshwater lake full of plant life about 50 million years ago.
The Moho, often pictured as the ‘gates of hell’ in sci-fi stories and fantasy fiction novels, will provide crucial data for research, China believes. Samples from the earth’s mantle, if successfully obtained, will open a whole new frontier of exploration and research to understand the planet better, as per Chinese scientists.
