The Moho is in reach of ocean drilling with the Meng Xiang

[speckx]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01675-7

[NikkiA]

Oh great, that urban myth/email-chain about the deepest well having sounds of wailing and so on will start circulating again.

For reference: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4307

[pavel_lishin]

Anyone else suddenly start thinking about Project Azorian?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

[chuckadams]

Borehole mines are great, but boy do they attract mindworms.

[ashoeafoot]

Could one use the oceanwater for cooling?

[cess11]

I'm guessing it's not a particularly good idea to drill holes down to the mantle.

[rsynnott → cess11]

Traditionally, it simply results in you running out of money (the previous US, Soviet and German attempts all ended up scrapped for funding reasons).

[Qem → cess11]

Worth trying. If it suceeds when US, URSS and Germany failed before, it will be a Sputnik-level feat for China. Great way to showcase technological advancement. If it fails, it will be the fourth time somebody failed, so not particularly embarassing.

[CharlieDigital → cess11]

I'm pretty certain that's where the Kaiju are.

[perihelions]

Hey, FYI, this is a plagiarized version of an article[*] from Xinhua (China's government press office), who aren't credited. The OP link is some AI slop that copies and rewrites things with an LLM.

[*] (.gov.cn) https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202411/17/content_WS6739adf7... ("China's first deep-ocean drilling vessel enters service")

If moderators see this and choose to change the URL, here's several more versions of this story:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01675-7 ("The Moho is in reach of ocean drilling with the Meng Xiang")

https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-dreamy-new-s... ("China’s ‘dreamy’ new ship aims for Earth’s mantle—and assumes ocean-drilling leadership")

[realslimjd → perihelions]

It's sad that AI spam is starting to show up here

[damnitbuilds]

Why is the mass of the ship especially interesting here?

Edit: Ah, AI written. :-(

[lm28469 → damnitbuilds]

Given the number of ads and overall feel of the site it definitely looks like an AI powered ad sense billboard. Since LLMs became popular there are more and more of them, the first page of most google queries are full of them. The "LLMs will replace search engines" trope seems true only because they destroyed search engines.

[falcor84]

Having watched Pacific Rim, I just hope we have the mecha ready by the time they open the breach and kaiju start coming out.