Overview of DUSEL

Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory

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For more than 125 years, the Homestake mine in Lead, SD served as one of the top producing gold mines in North America. In 2001, following a decline in gold prices and depletion of the resource, North America’s largest and deepest gold mine closed. South Dakotans looked for a use for the defunct mine and found that the deep underground shafts and drifts (tunnels) might serve a new purpose: that of a deep underground science lab.

In 2007, the National Science Foundation selected Homestake as the place to propose establishing a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Because funding for DUSEL construction likely will not come before fiscal 2012 or later, the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority established the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake which will host experiments, from the surface to a level 4,850 feet underground. Scientists at the Sanford Lab already have begun experiments in seismology and biology. Sanford Lab personnel and contractors are working to pump water out of the mine to prepare the 4,850 level for physics experiments. The late Dr. Ray Davis was awarded a Nobel Prize for physics in 2003 for an experiment he conducted at Homestake. It is reasonable to expect more Nobel Prize worthy accomplishments in physics and geology to emerge from deep underground.

If the larger DUSEL is approved, it will include the experiments planned for the Sanford Laboratory at Homestake. The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority will own the property (a donation from the Barrick Gold Corp.) and act as a sort of landlord for the lab. In addition, the Sanford Science and Education Center, funded in part by $20 million of T. Denny Sanford’s $70 million donation to the lab project, will operate in association with the lab.

When built, DUSEL will be a series of large laboratories serving the field of underground science. The main impetus for DUSEL is the study of extremely rare nuclear physics processes, like neutrino scattering, dark matter interactions, and neutrinoless double beta decay, which can only be studied in the absence of cosmic rays. (Cosmic ray muons on the Earth's surface cause backgrounds in these types of detectors, but the particles cannot penetrate great depths in rock.) Easy access to these great depths will open new frontiers in geomicrobiology, geosciences, and mining engineering, making DUSEL a multidisciplinary facility.

According to scientists who hope to work in the DUSEL lab, this project will provide more than academic research to the scientific community. The facility will create jobs in the community, and it will attract visitors from throughout South Dakota, the region and even the world. This is an exciting time for students studying science at universities throughout the Black Hills, including Black Hills State University in nearby Spearfish and South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City.