Big hole sheds new light on earthquakes

A team of scientists halted a bid to drill a 1.3-kilometer-deep hole into the Alpine Fault in New Zealand's South Island because of equipment problems, but they said on Wednesday the hole had already yielded a lot of information about earthquake processes.

Drilling stopped at 893 meters, the deepest borehole to be drilled into a fault in New Zealand, and was probably 100 to 200 meters short of the fault itself, the scientists said.

The Deep Fault Drilling Project at Whataroa, north of Franz Josef, was jointly led by New Zealand's Victoria and Otago universities and the government's Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and included scientists from more than a dozen countries.