Soudan Underground Mine State Park
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Soudan Underground Mine State Park is a Minnesota state park on the south shore of Lake Vermilion. It contains the Soudan Mine and hosts the University of Minnesota Soudan Underground Laboratory. The Soudan Mine was created in the late 1800s when gold prospectors discovered extremely rich veins of hematite, which often contained more than 65% iron. The Soudan orebody was known for its extremely hard iron ore, and for the vertical character of the orebody. The vertical structure forced engineers to switch from open pit to underground mining methods in the interest of safety. By 1912 the mine was at a depth of 1,250 feet, and when it closed level 27 was being developed, at a depth of 2,341 feet below the surface. The mine ceased operations in 1962, mainly because of the superior efficiency of taconite mines. U.S. Steel then donated the Soudan Mine to the state of Minnesota to use for educational purposes.
The primary underground mining method used was known as cut and fill. This involved mining the ceiling and using Ely Greenstone and other waste rock to artificially raise the floor at the same rate as the ceiling was being mined out. As a result the floor and ceiling were always 10-20 feet apart, and waste rock never had to be hauled to the surface, since it was recycled. This was not possible in the Ely mines due to the fact that their iron formations were not as solid as those in Soudan.
In the 1980s the University of Minnesota realized that the Soudan Mine offered a pristine environment for certain sensistive physics experiments, due to the face that very little cosmic radiation makes it 1/2 mile underground. The MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment uses the NuMI particle accelerator at FermiLab in Illinois to send a beam of neutrinos to a detector located underground in the Soudan Mine. This experment is aimed at determining whether neutrino oscillations are possible, which would prove that neutrinos have mass.
Soudan Mine State Park offers two tours for the public: one that explores the rich mining history of the area and another to explain the workings of the state of the art physics labs.
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