 |
|
© Bobby Yip
/ Reuters
|
A huge deposit holding at
least 470 tons of gold has been discovered beneath the seabed of the East China
Sea. The
largest deposit is located two kilometers below sea level in an area with
estimated reserves of at least 1,500 tons of gold. It was discovered in the
Laizhou city which has the largest gold reserves in China. More than 2,000 tons
of gold has been found there recently.
“It’s
very difficult to locate and set up the drilling platforms at sea,” said Ding
Zhengjiang, the deputy director of the Shandong Provincial No. 3 Institute.
RT report continues:
The
project’s manager Zhang Junjin added that “drilling holes into underground
rocks that are more than 1,000 meters deep is a big challenge while in China
gold mine prospecting is normally conducted within 800 meters underground. The
discovery of a gold deposit lying 2000 meters undersea provides the need for
new drilling technology for future gold mining,” Zhang said.
The
marine prospecting took three years, and involved over 120 kilometers of
drilling, with 67 sea drilling platforms and about 1,000 drillers and
geologists.
Earlier
this year Beijing proposed deep seabed mining cooperation in Indian Ocean.
China said India was an ideal partner in terms of the development of deep
seabed mining. Both countries are the world’s largest gold consumers.
In July China revealed a
nearly 60 percent increase in gold reserves in the past six years, becoming the
fifth largest holder of gold in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment