Imagining Scientific Realities Deep Underground: Utilizing Knowledge and 3-D Geological Modeling, Fundamental Tenets of The University of Minnesota’s Proposed Institute for Underground Science and Soudan Dusel

Peterson, Dean M
2007-03
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Imagining Scientific Realities Deep Underground: Utilizing Knowledge and 3-D Geological Modeling, Fundamental Tenets of The University of Minnesota’s Proposed Institute for Underground Science and Soudan Dusel

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2007-03

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University of Minnesota Duluth

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The ultimate goal of scientific research is to enhance knowledge, thus allowing one (or all) to imagine reality. The most renowned physicists, e.g., Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr, and geologists, e.g., Nicholas Steno, William Smith, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Alfred Wegener, Harry Hess, and J. Tuzo Wilson, all used their individual imaginations to open the door to new scientific realities that we as a society now realize. Quite possibly the greatest scientific reality ever imagined is Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection (“On the Origin of Species,” published in 1859). The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) goal of scientific research at a U.S. Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) is to enhance our collective knowledge of physics, geology, biology, and engineering through dedicated research in a deep underground setting. This short report highlights some of the geological features and their relationships to future science opportunities associated with the University of Minnesota’s most recent (January 9, 2007) DUSEL proposal to the NSF (Marshak et al., 2007). In this proposal, the University plans to develop the Institute for Underground Science (IUS) at the University of Minnesota and expand the current Soudan Underground Laboratory down to a depth of 1500m, i.e., 4125 meters of water equivalent (MWE) immediately southeast of its current location. The IUS would be a widely-collaborative, multidisciplinary institute with a mission to facilitate a coherent theoretical and experimental program in underground science and technology. Previous University of Minnesota DUSEL proposals (Marshak et al., 2003, 2005) have outlined the opportunities for deep underground science at the Soudan Mine near Tower, Minnesota, though an interdisciplinary science vision was not yet developed in the 2003 proposal, and the location of a Soudan DUSEL in the 2005 proposal was approximately one mile east (and thus largely hosted within a different stratigraphic sequence of rocks) than the recently proposed site at Soudan.

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NRRI Report of Investigations;NRRI/RI-2007/02

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Natural Resources Research Institute, University of Minnesota Duluth, 5013 Miller Trunk Highway, Duluth, MN 55811-1442

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Peterson, Dean M. (2007). Imagining Scientific Realities Deep Underground: Utilizing Knowledge and 3-D Geological Modeling, Fundamental Tenets of The University of Minnesota’s Proposed Institute for Underground Science and Soudan Dusel. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/190412.

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