SURF and South Dakota Mines team up on microbe research

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Sanford Underground Research Facility and South Dakota Mines have teamed up to study life in one of the planet’s most extreme environments, deep underground.

Scientists at South Dakota Mines are performing tests with water from a place you may not expect. Deep underground in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the water can sometimes contain microbes that exist in extreme environments. The main focus of these experiments is on what separates these microbes from ones found elsewhere.

“So this part of the study is sort of exploratory in the sense that we’re just trying to understand what the differences are and then hopefully moving forward we can do some modeling to see how different rock types or how deep we are from the surface or where we are in space and how that ultimately affects the water chemistry,” said Scott Beeler a scientist with South Dakota Mines.

There’s a wide range of potential applications for this research but the most important is that it will help scientists understand SURF as a system more comprehensively. Beeler says this research could even have an impact on how we understand microbiology on other planets.

“Mars is one of the big ones and obviously Mars is the red planet so it’s also iron rich and the surface is iron rich so there are some comparisons that could be made there,” said Beeler.

This testing also serves as a test run for SURF to see how successful working with Mines can be for future research.

“SURF is famous worldwide for its physics experiments but there’s so much more to offer there and that’s one of the things that we want to do is to sort of ramp up the aspects outside of physics that could be done there,” said Beeler.

Beeler says they will be collecting data for a few more months and anticipates they will be done analyzing it by the end of the year.

Copyright 2023 KOTA. All rights reserved.