Old mine promises pure scientific gold

Scientists discuss possible work at underground lab

By Dirk Lammers, Associated Press

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Dirk Lammers / Associated Press

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds speaks to scientists at the the DUSEL Initial Suite of Experiments Workshop. A demand exists for an underground lab, physicist Kevin Lesko said.

A former gold mine that yielded riches for more than a century is poised to spend the next half-century offering scientific prospectors a deeper understanding of the universe.

More than 350 of the world's top scientists descended on South Dakota's Black Hills this past week to discuss experiments that could be done in the former Homestake mine as it's converted into a world-class underground science laboratory.

Bob Svoboda, a University of California at Davis physicist hoping to use the mine to detect dark matter, said Homestake will be a valuable resource that won't become obsolete.

"A hole's a hole," Svoboda said. "It's one of the deepest holes, so unless you dig a deeper hole, this will be the site of the world's science experiments for probably several decades."

There's an international demand for underground lab space and a need for such a facility in the United States, physicist Kevin Lesko said.

Lesko, who's been studying ghostly particles called neutrinos for two decades, has been traveling from his office at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to conduct his research at either Canada's Sudbury Neutrino Observatory or Japan's Kamioka Observatory.

"I have all the lifetime miles I need," said Lesko, principal investigator for the Homestake DUSEL project. "I don't need any more."

The National Science Foundation last year picked the former Homestake mine as the preferred site for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory 7,400 feet below the surface. In the interim, South Dakota is building the Sanford Laboratory at Homestake at the 4,850-foot level so some experiments can begin earlier.

Dick Digennaro, DUSEL project manager, said the $500 million Homestake project is unusual because it will combine both facility construction and scientific experiment planning in the proposal to the NSF.

"Most of the time, the experiments are planned and proposed independently from a facility development," Digennaro said.

Scientists are excited about Homestake because they'll reap the benefits of a site that'll be completely dedicated to research.

"Homestake is a unique opportunity where this is a dedicated facility where people don't have the constraints," he said. "The priority of the management of this facility will be devoted to promoting scientific research, and the decisions can be made without some of those other conflicting activities that are seen at other facilities."

The lab's life span is designed to be 40 to 50 years, so researchers can perform baseline experiments and return periodically to track trends. Such longevity can be key to expanding scientists' understanding of the origins of the universe.

"It gives people the opportunity not simply to go into a site and do some work but then monitor changes over a period of decades," Digennaro said.

In 2006, Princeton geoscientist Tullis Onstott and his research team discovered bacteria nearly two miles down a South African gold mine that has been isolated from the Earth's surface for several million years.