Scientific Drilling ‐ to Construct the Telescopes that Inserting to the Earth Interior
Authors: ZHANG Xiaoxi , ZHANG Hui 
Published: November 2020

Mankind live in the earth for countless years, but until now; people do not really understand the connotation of the Earth. We know that the earth composition including the lithosphere, the asthenosphere, mantle and core. Of course, the lithosphere supports all the life on Earth. For a long time, geoscientists trying to use all kind of methods such as geological, geophysical and geochemical methods to detect and study the earth, but the knowledge about earth are mostly indirect. Through the direct observation to the lithosphere, people can understand and recognize the plate movement of ocean and the mainland, crustal stress, earthquakes, volcanic processes, deep resources, the origins of life, global climate change and biodiversity. They are all the basis of a series of geosciences problems (Su and Yang, 2010).

Geological specimens, especially the true samples from deep of the Earth, are the most directly study subjects for geologists. But the only way to access the true samples from deep of the earth is drilling. The most directly relevant evidence always originated from the deep of the earth, such as core, cuttings, fluid samples and other physical samples.

Continental scientific drilling has been demonstrated which is an efficient technique for directly obtaining information from the Earth's surface to the deep crust, and is acknowledged as “to build a telescope inserting to the interior of the Earth”, as well as “a key for opening the door of the Earth”. Over the last four decades, continental scientific drilling has achieved great success in enhancing our knowledge of the Earth, and in providing information on mineral resources, large engineering projects and global change. SinoProbe‐05 is a new scientific drilling venture, which builds on the success of the Chinese Continental Scientific Drilling Project (CCSD), and is similar to the current major scientific drilling project on the Wenchuan earthquake fault. SinoProbe‐05 will focus on 6 critical tectonic and mineral resource regions, including the Jinchuan Cu‐Ni sulphide deposits in Gansu, the Luobusa chromite deposits in Tibet, the Tengchong volcano‐thermal tectonic zone in Yunnan, the Yudu‐Ganxian polymetallic deposits in South China, the Tongling polymetallic deposit and the Luzong volcanic basin and mineral deposit district in Anhui. As of the end of 2013, all of these pilot holes have been completed, all of them have achieved the desired scientific objectives.

The construction of another ICDP project, Songke No.2 well, has come to an end. Current well depth is 5929m. Drilling throughout the Cretaceous strata is just around the corner (The design well depth is 6400m.). This will be the first complete Cretaceous stratigraphic profile in the world.

The deep exploration project which will be stared soon will build a large number of different depths of scientific drilling holes. The deepest hole depth will reach to 13000m. We believe that the construction of these scientific coring drilling holes will provide geologists with a lot of real core samples. These cores can meet the needs for different geoscience research areas. No doubt, the research results based on these cores will promote China's geological science research to a new height, of course; will also contribute to the progress of the world's earth science. This is also a good opportunity to promote China's drilling technology.

So, we know that no advanced drilling technology, no enough high quality samples from the deep of the Earth, the in‐depth studies for geosciences will be restricted of course (Zhang et al., 2013).