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The submersible, called “fendouzhe” or “striver,” landed on the seafloor at the bottom of Earth’s deepest ocean trench on Tuesday morning, Xinhua said, after leaving China’s Hainan province a month earlier. .
The dive surpassed China’s previous dive in the Mariana Trench by more than 800 meters (2,624 feet), but it narrowly missed the world record for the deepest dive in the Mariana Trench.
The current world record is believed to have been set by American underwater explorer Victor Vescovo, who claimed to have reached a depth of 10,927 meters (35,853 feet) in May 2019.
But China’s goals for the dive aren’t just scientific research. Ye Cong, the chief designer of the submersible, told Chinese state media that the seabed was full of resources.
High-tech diving equipment can help us better draw a “treasure map” of the deep sea, Ye said in an interview quoted by Xinhua.
In a comment about the dive, posted on the official WeChat account of the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the official spokesperson for the ruling Communist Party, the author said deep-sea exploration was important to better understand the ” international strategic panorama “.
“For example, Japan recently discovered rare earth resources in the Pacific Ocean, where recoverable reserves are said to be 1,000 times more than on land. The ocean floor is a whole new world. If we don’t explore this world, others will. explore it, “the comment read.
Rare earths, which are essential for the production of high-tech products like smartphones, missile systems and radars, are currently largely controlled by China.
Beijing is working hard to make sure it maintains its dominance in this area. In July, the Chinese government raised its quota for rare earth mining to a record high, as high as 140,000 tonnes (140 million kilograms).
According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, Chinese companies have been investing in rare earth companies in Greenland as economic opportunities emerge in the Arctic region.
But it faces stiff competition from countries around the world.
In 2018, Japanese researchers made what was described as a game-changing find on their tiny island of Minamitori in the Pacific Ocean, where millions of tons of extremely valuable rare earths were discovered in nearby sea mud.
That same year, Reuters reported that India was willing to spend more than a billion dollars over a decade to search large areas of the seabed for any signs of rare earths or minerals that could be mined.
The International Seabed Authority was due to agree on a mining code in mid-2020, and China was just one of many nations lining up to explore and exploit the seabed, but there was no final agreement until October.
Additional information from CNN’s Beijing office.
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