Engineering research continues to allow scientists to look further under the ocean, in an effort both to better understand the environment down in the depths and to find ways to access the various resources trapped under the waves.
The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology announced that some of its scientists have managed to successfully drill samples down farther under the water than ever before, according to ScienceDaily.
The oil and gas industry has been operating in ever-deeper water, chasing new reserves, but scientific vessels had only managed to drill down as far as 2,111 meters below the seafloor.
JAMSTEC’s new ship, Chikyu, has managed to surpass this record, drilling as far down as 2,200 meters below the seafloor as part of a project to explore deeply-buried coal beds. What’s more, the ship is designed to be able to drill as far down as 10,000 meters below the surface of the water.
“We have just opened a window to the new era of scientific ocean drilling,” Fumio Inagaki, co-chief scientist of the Chiky’s Expedition 337, said in a statement. “This scientific vessel has tremendous potentials to explore very deep realms that humans have never studied before.”
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