Aug. 27 – Engineers have started to design and plan a US$72.8 million research base on China’s eastern coast to accelerate the study and exploration of deep-sea resources, officials said on Thursday.

Set to be established in Qingdao, Shandong Province, the base will cover 64.25 acres of land and will extend a further 155 acres into the sea. The research base will also double as a support station for the Chinese deep-sea manned submersible vessel “Jiaolong.”

Named after a mythical sea dragon, the 8.2 meter long, 22 ton “Jiaolong” is designed to dive to depths of up to 7,000 meters and successfully reached 3,759 meters below the South China Sea during 17 trial runs conducted from May to July this year.

“Such a depth means that Chinese scientists are able to conduct research in the deep. It also marks China becoming one of the few countries that possess manned deep-diving technology,” Liu Feng, the director in charge of the drills, told China Daily. The achievement makes China the fifth country in the world to acquire deep-sea diving technology alongside Russia, France, Japan, and the United States.

China believes that sea beds at depths of 4,000 to 6,000 meters could potentially hold abundant deposits of rare metals and methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas found stored in ice. The submersible vessel “Jiaolong” will hopefully be able to validate this belief as it scours the seafloor.

China has also claimed that it used the vessel to plant the Chinese flag deep beneath the South China Sea, an area of longstanding territorial dispute with several of China’s Southeast Asian neighbors.