Deep Underground Science · 3:05pm Jul 5th, 2015
This week, I take a break from ponies to tell you about my own adventures. I’ve just returned home from a week in Yorkshire doing science in dark, dusty tunnels 1.1km underground.
How did this come about? Some 250-300 million years ago, north-east England was a shallow sea. This evaporated in arid conditions, leaving thick layers of salt, potash, and other minerals, now buried beneath a kilometre of rock. In the 1970s a mine shaft was dug at Boulby on the North Yorkshire coast to extract the potash, which is turned into fertilizer, applied to farm crops, then washed back into the sea, so in another few hundred million years it will turn into another layer of salt, completing a cycle which the Pie family would understand.
This is one of the deepest mines in Europe, employing over a thousand people and producing a million tonnes of potash a year. Unlike the Yorkshire coal mines, it has survived changing economic conditions, expanding to a network of hundreds of miles of tunnels extending under the North Sea.
The deep location makes it an ideal site for the sort of science which needs an extremely low radioactive background. Radioactivity is everywhere, but it's much less underground. Hiking in the mountains, or lying on the beach on the surface of the Earth, we are continuous bombarded by high energy cosmic rays from outer space. We don't notice them, but they make it impossible to do many experiments. Hence the Boulby Underground Laboratory was established in the mine, originally to search for Dark Matter (which is a story I will tell another time, basically testing a theory that most of the mass of the galaxy consists of particles which interact so rarely with ordinary matter, that the only chance of seeing them is in such a deep underground site). But the lab has since branched into other activities such as astrobiology – studying the microbial life in the salt, which may tell us something about what life could exist on other planets.
What took me there was something else. I am interested in taking super-precise measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. As the solar wind hits the upper atmosphere, the resulting space weather produces daily wiggles in the magnetic field above us. What interests me is how these magnetic signals penetrate into the ground, and what this tells us about the rock beneath our feet. Can we use it to map the sub-surface world without digging holes?
It occurred to me that the Boulby mine provides a unique place where we can take measurements inside the Earth. Unless, of course, all the magnetic noise from the mining trucks, lifts, conveyor belts, cutters and diggers swamps the tiny signals we are looking for. Only one way to find out...
So I drove up to North Yorkshire, and executed a plan with some friends. Working in a mine means a 6am start, to dress up in day-glow orange overalls, safety hats, boots, eye and ear protectors, self rescuers. Then take the ride down the shaft and trek through the dark tunnels cut in the salt to the laboratory; set up instruments... Then wait three hours until we can get a ride back to the surface.
So I had an exhausting week, and I now have loads of data to analyse. Preliminary results look good. Which is my excuse for not writing any pony words. Sometimes real life gets more interesting.
Let's just throw in one pony image.
Seriously Lemon Hearts, how did you manage that?
Thanks to the team at Boulby for being awesome hosts.
Sigh. Your job is way more interesting than mine.
3208962
Well I only blog about the fun bits. Not every week is like this.
I really need to watch the new episode, don't I?
I think it has to do with how ponies occupy the same ecological niche as cats.
Cool to catch word of some actual science going down!
On the image: Am I the only one disappointed that Larson missed a perfectly good opportunity for an Erlenmare flask pun?
3209385
They are clearly gelatinous.
What you really need when making lots of delicate magnetic measurements, is either a Babbage machine, so purely mechanical, or a gem based optical quantum logic processor, again, so theres no leakage.
Or why not combine optical and mechanical, and make a chaos engine.
I keep seeing weird things, like the reasons electrons react with matter but neutrinos dont, is because eleectrons move through 4 spacial demintions, and neutrinos dont. Or, an electron is a neutino with a charge, or othe such strangeness.
That, and the use of the term imaginary numbers means you have the signs in the maths the wrong way round because of course space isnt imaginary 3 vector etc.
Something I was trying to ask a while back. At what point, if any, does the gravitational field of something weaken to the point where it is no more than the random fluctuations in spacetime, and does it therefore cease to exist beyod this point, even as it continues propagating?
Theres a couple vehicles you can consider down there. Holland has Flywheel buses, tested sometime in the past, and theres at last one guy in the UK who hooked up a compressed air cylinder to his car to use as a power source. All it has to do is get you there and back? how about a pedal cart? given bikes are rather unstable?
A fascinating idea. I hope it pans out.
Also, Minuette was a sadistic little filly.
This reminds me about an argument I had with a friend about where to build a Lunar Colony:
I wanted and still want to build the Lunar colony within 5% of 1 of the poles for the volatiles frozen onto the bottoms of craters on the Cis-Side of Luna for communications with Tellus, in a LavaTube at least a KiloMeter beneath the surface for protection from Cosmic Rays. He wanted to build the Lunar Colony on the surface for the view. I pointed that his Lunar Colony would fail because everypony would die from radiationexposure.
This is pretty intriguing! Being a lover of all things science, I'm curious to know more about these experiments! (And being more technologically minded, very curious as to many of the instruments used!). Will you be making any more blogs about your work?
No seriously, how did she do that? Even ignoring the rest of her head her horn is bent at a downward angle.
3225210
Sure. Although most of the blog posts I write about my work are disguised as pony stories.
Oh my God, I read this so eagerly upon seeing "underground" "Yorkshire", "science" and "tunnels underground". I thought, good Lord, is there another caver on this website? Was Pineta in Ease Gill Caverns doing science? This is so exciting!
Alas, you don't seem to be a caver, but your time in Boulby sounds fascinating and so does your job. If you have any more fun adventures it would be great to hear about them.
But... some of us consider standing around getting cold underground with a compass, a clinometer and a tape-measure to be part and parcel of a fun weekend away...
3309834
Just think of all the exciting new cold wet underground caverns we might discover for you with better technology.
3309949 I shiver just imagining it... with delight I mean, not with the cruel grasp of imagined hypothermia.