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World's Deepest Laboratory Being Built in South Dakota

by Caleb Johnson on June 24, 2009 at 08:05 AM


It's straight out of a movie: an underground lab that runs as deep as six Empire State Buildings, designed to study particles called dark matter. (We can just picture James Bond shooting villains down there.) The location is the only part that has us confused (007 in South Dakota?), but, according to The Straits Times, the location deep within the Black Hills is perfect; it is protected from cosmic rays and is also the former site of Nobel Prize-winning physics experiments.

Monday, scientists and officials broke ground on one lab, about 4,900 feet below the surface, where today some geology and hydrology experiments are already underway. If federal funding comes through, there are plans to build two still deeper labs. An old gold mine with tunnels that go as deep as 8,000 feet, however, the site would have to be stabilized before any other labs could be built.


Whether it's natural or man-made, the depths of Earth capture our imagination. We couldn't imagine going that far below ground, let alone studying one of the most unknown areas of science while down there. Let's just hope they don't run into any dinosaurs, or, even worse, Brendan Fraser. [From: The Straits Times]

Tags: dark matter, DarkMatter, laboratory, science, underground

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