“Geo is deep earth.” We can image deep space and the formation of stars, but at present we have great difficulty imaging even tens of meters into the earth. We want to develop a Hubble telescope into, not away from, the earth–a tool for high resolution imaging of the Earth’s interior. Our Subsurface Imaging and Sensing team at the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory near the old Homestake Mine in the Lead, South Dakota, facility is developing and refining the science necessary to image the earth at the many scales required. These new tools allow the community to gain a deeper 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. Our suite of experiments combines the power of many methodologies to provide strong constraints on the necessary inversions, and allows us to bring our images into sharper focus. The Homestake Mine provides a unique facility in which to allow this multi-scale and multi-physics campaign to happen.
Deep Geo-Science & Information Technology
