Water expands when it freezes. This simple yet fundamental fact of nature can lead to cracks in building foundations, crumbling roads and huge rocks that fall onto canyon roadways from the cliffs above.

Past research into this problem has shown that when the ground freezes tiny pockets of ice trapped in the soil expands. This can create what is known as frost-heave in the winter and in the spring, when ground thaws it creates thaw-weakening settlement. Over time this freeze-thaw cycle causes damage to the ground and poses major challenges for human made structures, like bridges, dams, pipelines, buildings, roads and homes. Each year, the freeze-thaw cycle leads to billions of dollars in mitigation and repair costs around the world.

Now, a team of scientists and engineers at South Dakota Mines has received $453,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to seek solutions to these problems.

“We are trying to understand more about the fundamentals of ice formation underground and if there are natural methods that we can use to stop or control the ground from freezing,” says Tejo V. Bheemasetti, Ph.D., assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at South Dakota Mines.

This South Dakota Mines Research Blog article is based on a press release from the California Academy of Sciences published here.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) petroleum drilling rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana, resulting in the world’s worst oil spill in history with more than 4 million barrels of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico. Though the short-term impact of the oil spill on local wildlife was widely researched among scientists and discussed in the media, there has been relatively little research on the long-term effects of the disaster. 

Laurie Anderson, Ph.D, professor and head of the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at South Dakota Mines, collected Eastern Oysters from the Gulf Coast. A second set of oysters was collected from the Chesapeake Bay area that were unaffected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

 “We were able to collect live specimens of common coastal species of snails, mussels, and oysters after the spill but prior to landfall of the spill throughout coastal Louisiana and Dauphin Island, Ala.,” says Anderson.  

Anderson joined other researchers from the Read Full Article

This article was written by Erin Lorraine Broberg at the Sanford Underground Research Facility and republished here with permission. Find the original article here.

When first learning about the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), it can help to imagine it as a vast, inverted apartment complex. Experiments move into the large, underground caverns. And SURF provides the usual amenities: electricity, running water, elevator maintenance, radon mitigation, liquid nitrogen deliveries and, of course, shielding from cosmic rays.

But amidst the facility’s 370 miles of tunnels, shafts and drifts, there is one group of tenants who pay no rent at all. At SURF, billions of microorganisms—known to biologists as “extremophiles” for their ability to carve out a living far from sunlight and with limited oxygen—live deep underground.

This summer, a research group from South Dakota Mines (Mines) retrieved a core sample—a smooth cylinder of grey rock—from 4,100 feet below of the surface of SURF. Under a microscope, it wriggled with SURF’s hardiest inhabitants.

From this sample, the research group hopes to find a microbe with a distinct set of characteristics that could help store excess greenhouse gases deep underground.

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