Elusive ‘Geoneutrinos’ Are Building a New Map of Earth’s Volatile Interior
Scientists at the SNO+ laboratory in Canada are using a massive underground detector to capture geoneutrinos, rare particles emitted from the Earth's interior. These particles provide researchers with data to better understand the planet's heat sources and tectonic activity.
Why it matters
Understanding the Earth's internal heat processes is fundamental to comprehending plate tectonics and the generation of the planet's magnetic field.
Normally, the cavern is one of the darkest places on Earth, but today it is lit up for maintenance, offering us a rare chance to see inside. I peer through the hatch at Depatie as he paddles over to examine the submerged experiment. He’s inspecting a house-sized detector built to catch some of the most elusive particles known to physics: neutrinos.
This is the SNO+ neutrino experiment, buried deep within the Creighton mine at Snolab, an underground physics laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. SNO+ consists of an acrylic sphere lined with nearly 10,000 sensitive light detectors and filled with 780 tons of oily liquid scintillator, which flashes when lit up by energetic particles. The water around the device and the rock above it shield the detector from the glare of cosmic radiation, allowing the flickers of less common particle interactions to shine through.
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