A crew in Japan has pose the record for the deepest sea drilling and the deepest sub - sea stratum sample distribution after regain a 37 - meter - foresighted ( 121 feet ) deposit core from a site on the seabed just over 8 kilometers ( 5 international nautical mile ) below ocean level .
The research vas KAIMEI set the record on the morn of May 14 , 2021 , at a site in the Japan Trench in the Western Pacific , harmonize to anannouncementon the project ’s web log . The previous record book was localize in 1978 when the drilling vesselGlomar Challengerrecovered a deposit core from the seabed at 7 - km ( 4.3 mile ) water supply depth in theMariana Trench .
For the novel feat , boring equipment was sent into the water a 9:20 am local time and it took 2 hours and 40 minutes to reach the seafloor . It was n’t until 3:00 Prime Minister local time it was successfully recovered and brought back to the ship deck of cards .
The project , known asExpedition 386 , is a collaborationism between the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling ( ECORD ) and the Japan Agency of Marine - Earth Science and Technology ( JAMSTEC ) . As of May 10 , the researchershad collecteda aggregate of 342 time of core sampling from a total of eight land site along the integral Japan Trench .
They aim to use the abstruse - ocean sediment core to see the history of earthquakes in Japan and the Western Pacific . The Japan Trench , the field being studied , is an pelagic trench part of the Pacific Ring of Fire , a horseshoe - shaped whang around the rim of the Pacific Ocean that ’s rife with volcanic activity and earthquakes . While ancient seism were not measured scientifically , it ’s clear this part of the world has been wracked by earthquakes for millions of years , but scientist are n’t certain how often they go on nor how powerful they were .
Earthquakes have leave behind their mark on Japan in many direction . In Nipponese mythology , quake were triggered by a giant catfish that lives beneath the ground named Namazu or Ōnamazu . The squad is n’t expecting to find any giant siluriform fish , but the core will be closely study to understand the earthquakes that escape from the world some 50,000 to 100,000 geezerhood ago , long before the invention of instruments and historical records .
" These radical - deep water basins are among the deepest and least - explore environments on Earth , but they comprise the concluding sink of seism - triggered deposit remobilization , thus leave excellent and continuous archive of preceding earthquake occurrences,“Professor Michael Strasser , co - chief scientist and geologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria , say in astatement .
" It ’s as if the sedimentary archive were an ultra - deep - water seismograph that has been recording major seism event over time period extending several ten-spot of thousands of years into the past . The most recent elephantine 2011 Tohoku - oki Earthquake and older megathrust earthquakes documented in Japanese written history allow us to calibrate this ' born seismograph ' to ravel this aqueous inscrutable - time archive of preceding earthquakes . "
