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Even in the face of impressive feats such as the Kola Superdeep Borehole (12,2 km) and the gigantic Bingham Canyon mine (1,2 km), digging to reach China would require crossing approximately 12.700 km of Earth, a challenge that surpasses any achievement of modern engineering.
Who hasn't heard, as a child, that if they kept digging the ground in their backyard they would reach the other side of the world? The expression "dig until you reach China" is famous and feeds children's imagination, but from a scientific point of view, things don't work that way. Research on the internal structure of the Earth, such as that analyzed by geophysicist Andrew Gase of Boise State University, indicates that crossing the planet from one end to the other is much more complex than it seems.
Beyond China, the Earth is divided into three main layers: crust, mantle and core. The crust is as thin in comparison to the diameter of the planet as the skin of an apple is in relation to the fruit. Just below, the mantle, made of heavy, dense rocks, moves slowly, with hot material rising and cooler material sinking, in a continuous cycle. In the center, the core, part liquid, part solid, reaches absurdly high temperatures and pressures, impossible to be circumvented by any current equipment.
The deeper the hole, the greater the pressure
In addition to the Earth's internal composition, there is another barrier to reaching China: the pressure exerted by the upper layers on the lower ones. The deeper the hole, the greater the pressure on the walls, which makes it practically impossible to form a straight and narrow passage.
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In open-pit mines, such as the famous Bingham Canyon in the United States, the proportion between depth and width needs to be carefully calculated to avoid landslides, even with all the technology and engineering employed.
Digging all the way to China is practically impossible
Now imagine trying to dig all the way to China while maintaining stability: it would be necessary to create an opening several times larger than the diameter of the Earth itself, an absurdity in practice.
Drilling, on the other hand, can go deeper than simple excavation, but it also faces strict limits. The deepest well ever drilled by humans, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, reached 12,2 kilometers, a very small amount considering the Earth’s diameter of almost 12.700 kilometers.
As each centimeter advances, problems such as high temperatures, melting of equipment, gigantic pressures and instability of the well walls accumulate, making the dream of digging all the way to China impossible with current techniques.
Even so, scientific advances and challenges overcome in subsurface exploration allow us to learn more and more about the Earth. Although we cannot cross it from one side to the other, deep studies and drilling, such as in the Kola Superdeep Borehole, and colossal excavations, such as in Bingham Canyon, feed knowledge about the planet and its interior layers.
