Japanese deep-sea drilling breaks depth record
The deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu is docked at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo.
A Japanese drilling boat conducting research into last year's tsunami says that it set a world record for the deepest ocean probe at over 25,000 feet.
The Chikyu vessel, which is operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, was drilling off Japan's northern coast to take fault samples, studying the cause of Japan's massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami last year.
Read more on GlobalPost: Fukushima: a year on
According to the Canadian Press, the vessel drilled into the fault zone at nearly 23,000 feet and continued drilling into the seabed last week.
The Associated Press reported that the previous record of about 23,000 feet was set by the US vessel Glomar Challenger, which probed the Mariana Trench in 1978.
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