Haiti and Chile earthquakes as seen from the 2000 Level

A team of scientists is working toward establishing a full Transparent Earth Observatory at the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake. Tiltmeters that measure the slightest rock movements already are installed on 2,000 feet underground in the the laboratory. These charts illustrate the magnitude of the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, as measure deep underground in the Black Hills. Instruments undergound here are sensitive enough to measure "earth tides." Just as oceans respond to the gravitational force of the moon, so does the eath's crust.

Steven Glaser of the University of California at Berkeley, Bill Roggenthen of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and Lane Johnson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are leading the Transparent Earth team here.

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 the Hubble into, not away from,
the earth. The Subsurface Imaging and Sensing – Transparent Earth working group will develop
and refine the science necessary to image the earth at many scales, use these abilities to gain
understanding of the rock and rock mass, and to leverage these discoveries into engineering
tools. Our team applies a wide variety of physical behaviors to perform this imaging. The
physics, however, relies on derived measures, and our analyses are most often cast as an inverse
problem. The proposed suite of experiments combines the power of a number of methodologies
to provide strong constraints on the necessary inversion, and allows us to bring our images into
sharper focus. The Homestake is the only facility that allows this multi-scale and multi-physics
campaign to peer into our complex earth.