Chinese scientists are embarking on their own real-life journey to the center of the earth by drilling the deepest-ever hole the country has attempted at 10,000 meters or 32,808 feet. The project broke ground in the Xinjiang region Tuesday and will pierce through 10 layers of continental strata to reach material dating back some 145 million years from the Cretaceous Period. It comes after President Xi Jinping urged scientists in 2021 for more deep Earth exploration, which could “identify mineral and energy resources and help assess the risks of environmental disasters, such as earthquakes and volcano eruptions,” Bloomberg reported. While the hole is impressively deep, it still lags behind the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, an over 12,000-meter-deep hole that took roughly 20 years to dig.