Key points
- Mengxiang formally entered service in Guangzhou on November 17 with a maximum drilling capability of 11,000 meters.
- The vessel is 179.8 meters long, 32.8 meters wide, displaces 42,600 tonnes and is China’s largest research vessel by tonnage.
- It has a range of 15,000 nautical miles, 120-day endurance, accommodation for 180, and can survive a category 16 super typhoon.
- More than 150 organizations built it in three years, over a year faster than comparable vessels internationally.
Drilling through the Earth’s crust and reaching the planet’s deep interior has been a long-standing scientific ambition. China’s newest research vessel is intended to bring that goal within reach.
On November 17, Mengxiang (Dream), China’s first domestically designed and built ocean drilling vessel, with a maximum drilling capability of 11,000 meters, formally entered service in Guangzhou.
Mengxiang is 179.8 meters long and 32.8 meters wide, with a displacement of 42,600 tonnes. It is currently China’s largest research vessel by tonnage, with a range of 15,000 nautical miles, an endurance of 120 days and accommodation for 180 people. Its stability and structural strength are designed to the safety requirements of a category 16 super typhoon, it can operate normally in sea state 6, and it is capable of unrestricted operations in all global sea areas.
The vessel is regarded as a major breakthrough in China’s key deep-sea exploration technology and equipment. Mengxiang is tasked with deep-sea resource exploration, ocean scientific drilling and deep-ocean scientific expeditions, and is seen as significant for national energy and resource security, for advancing key deep-sea technologies and for developing new marine productive capacity.
Xu Zhenqiang, director of the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey under the China Geological Survey of the Ministry of Natural Resources, said that deep-Earth core samples recovered by Mengxiang can provide the most direct evidence available to scientists worldwide for understanding plate tectonics, the evolution of the oceanic crust, ancient ocean climate and the evolution of life, helping humanity better understand, protect and develop the ocean.
Luo Bing, general manager of CSSC Huangpu Wenchong, said Mengxiang brings together top-level scientific and technological achievements from the marine, geological and other fields, and is an extremely complex system whose engineering workload and difficulty far exceed those of an ordinary ship.
More than 150 participating research and construction organizations across China completed the build in three years, more than a year faster than comparable vessels internationally, with key performance indicators described as leading across the board.
How hard is it to push into the deep Earth? The crust’s average thickness is about 17 kilometers, negligible against the Earth’s radius of roughly 6,371 kilometers, yet scientists have compared humanity’s progress so far to scratching the shell of an egg. Only by penetrating the crust can researchers reach the mantle, which accounts for about four fifths of the Earth’s volume and three quarters of its mass and is the planet’s largest chemical reservoir, still full of unresolved questions. The boundary between crust and mantle, known as the Moho discontinuity, lies about 30 to 40 kilometers below the continents but only about 6 to 7 kilometers beneath the ocean floor, which means drilling down from the deep sea is the easier route to reach and cross it.
To that end, Mengxiang is fitted with the world’s first hydraulic lifting drilling rig combining oil and gas exploration and core drilling functions, with a top drive lifting capacity of 907 tonnes. The rig supports four drilling modes and three coring methods, meeting the differing requirements of ocean drilling core recovery and of deep-sea mineral resource exploration and development, with substantially improved overall drilling efficiency and hard-rock drilling capability. CGS describes the drilling and production system as internationally leading.
Zhang Haibin, Mengxiang’s chief designer at the CSSC 708th Research Institute, said the vessel uses a modular design approach that overcame a series of world-class ship design challenges, and for the first time internationally integrates ocean scientific drilling, deep-sea oil and gas exploration and natural gas hydrate exploration and trial production functions in one vessel, establishing an independent Chinese design and construction technology system for ultra-deepwater drilling vessels. Two rounds of sea trials verified that the ship’s main performance indicators exceed design requirements.
As a deep-sea operations platform, Mengxiang functions as a mobile national laboratory at sea. The ship houses nine functional laboratories covering basic geology, paleomagnetism, inorganic geochemistry, organic geochemistry, microbiology, marine science, natural gas hydrate, geophysics and drilling technology, with a total area of more than 3,000 square meters, and carries the world’s first shipboard automated core transfer and storage system, supporting research needs across all marine disciplines.
Li Jinfa, member of the Party leadership group of the Ministry of Natural Resources and director of the China Geological Survey, said the vessel’s entry into service will provide strong support for basic research and deep-sea resource exploration in China, and will also offer a major platform for scientists worldwide to conduct ocean scientific drilling research and expand international cooperation in the geosciences.
