Scientists are just finished drilling Sweden's deepest hole, and they hope it will reveal secrets about how the Himalayas were formed.
The long stretch of mountains running along Sweden and Norway were once as high as the Himalayas.
And Swedish scientists are hoping to talk a look into the past, back hundreds of millions of years, by taking out a slice of mountain, all the way down to the roots.
"We've drilled a two-and-a-half-kilometer (1.55-mile) hole, to investigate how the mountain range was formed," geologist Henning Lorenz, from Uppsala University, told Swedish Radio.
The Scandinavian mountains, the Caledonides, were formed 400 million years ago. Lorenz says if they know how Sweden's mountains were formed, they can learn a lot about younger mountains ranges, like the Himalayas.
The drill that has gone down 2.5 kilometer (1.55 miles) is near the Åre ski resort. It is Sweden's deepest hole, and took from April to sink.
There are five areas scientists are looking into, reports Swedish Radio Jämtland: new information on how geothermal currents work inside mountains; how water is moving around; what life is like down there for the baceteria, and also geophysics.
Björn Almkvist, a geophysicist at Uppsala University, says you can see the elastic characteristics of the mountain, how hard the mountain is and how magnetic and electrical forces work.
This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch News as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.