Planning and Design for the Subsurface Imaging and Sensing Experiments at the DUSEL

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Intellectual Merit: "Geo is deep earth." While scientists can image deep space and the formation of stars, at present tools do not exist to image even tens of meters into the earth. What is needed is a Hubble telescope into, not away from, the earth - a tool for high resolution imaging of the Earth's interior. Through this award, the Subsurface Imaging and Sensing team will develop, combine, and refine the science necessary to image the earth at the many scales required for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) facility at the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, to use these abilities to gain understanding of rock and rock mass, and to leverage these discoveries into engineering tools. All the earth interrogation methods used by the team rely heavily on inversion methods because the data collected do not directly measure the physical quantity of interest. The proposed suite of experiments combines the power of many methodologies to provide strong constraints on the necessary inversions, and to bring images into sharper focus. The Homestake Mine provides the unique facility which allows this multi-scale and multi-physics campaign to happen. Prior to research commencing, the project team will develop a detailed design for the needed infrastructure and safety procedures. Infrastructure is only one small piece of the massive DUSEL undertaking, and requires a complete a work breakdown structure document. Several workshops will be held, two in order to broaden participation in the project team and involve more of the community in the DUSEL undertaking, and three workshops/design meets at the Homestake mine in Lead to provide real detail and certitude for the overall design process. Broader Impacts: The Subsurface Imaging and Sensing experiments will have two types of impact - societal and technical. Building on the initial contacts made by the PI for his ongoing NSF-supported project at DUSEL, "Towards a Transparent Earth," the observatory, through the Sanford Science and Education Center, will provide a lifelong learning experience for all stakeholders - K-12 students and teachers, the hundreds of thousands of visitors passing through the Black Hills annually, underrepresented groups in higher education, and the general student population. Outreach through the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the SDSTA, and near-by tribal colleges, is becoming deep and substantive. Local citizens will have a special role. There exists in the Lead area a body of knowledge about the Homestake mine that will never be equaled, i.e., the many people who have spent a good part of their lives working in the mine. A team of retired Homestake miners will be a key part of the project, to help make the design and planning optimal, realistic and safe. There are many technical implications of the observatory beyond direct imaging of rock behavior, such as: (1) Underground and Mine Safety - more quantitative methods to quickly locate potential dynamic rock failure within the mine will be an immediate benefit, (2) Homeland Security of Underground Facilities - use reciprocity to derive methods to detect and characterize underground structures and activity, and study explosions associated with coal mining activity in Wyoming as contribution to nuclear monitoring, and (3) Global Seismology - take advantage of location and depth of array to assess maximum frequency content of teleseismic phases.