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There's something rather special about the lab that I'm standing in right now.
There's some amazing science experiments behind me,
but that's not what makes this place unique.
What makes this place unique...
...is what's above us.
It's an interesting place. It's very difficult to describe.
So you go down this cage
and it takes about seven or 8 minutes and then you're a kilometer underground.
When people hear the word mine, they think of,
I don't know, mines in Cornwall, small mines that you crawl into.
Boulby is nothing like that.
It's huge roadways, a thousand kilometers of roadways
cut into this salt that are so big you can drive a truck down them.
It's very salty. It's very dark.
It's very dry.
And all those things give this place a very otherworldly feel about it.
You know, you crunch along these tunnels to the underground lab.
So you walk to this very dirty, dusty, salty lab, to this very high tech
laboratory looking for dark matter where we do some astrobiology research.
And that's the environment you're in.
It's an almost an environment almost like you would expect being in a laboratory
on Mars would be like
disconnected from the rest of the world.
I am 1.1 kilometers under Yorkshire
in the north of England at the Boulby underground lab.
We exist 1.1 kilometers underground in this mine here at Boulby.
So the lab here has existed since the 1990s.
And originally a professor from Sheffield University
wanted an underground space to really start to understand dark matter.
They approached the mine and asked basically,
can we have some space underground to do a little bit of science
and the mine were like, “Yeah, that’ll be fine.”
They, you know, they didn't particularly understand
what was going on, but it wasn't very invasive.
The lab here is, is built to host science from collaborations all over the world.
One of the things we can boast in is that we have a very broad science program
for most underground labs in the world exist for particle physics but we
we have really established ourselves as a multidisciplinary lab.
We have amazing environmental science that goes on.
We got the space technology we've got the astrobiology work
that goes on and really interesting geological science as well.
Although some of these underground labs are now exploring those avenues,
we really paved the way for that here at Boulby.
My name is Ed Banks.
My job title here is
Facility Science Support Technician,
which I think, has at least one too many words.
Essentially what that means is that I am the onsite lead for various experiments.
The actual science is owned by various institutions,
universities, businesses, and they send the science to us
and we run it for them remotely.
To be honest, I absolutely love it.
It's not far from probably a dream job for me.
Getting to work with different types of science every day is amazing.
So the first thing that you need to do is get kitted out in mine gear
because it is an active mine and we're going to be walking through that.
So you have your full orange
overalls, hardhat, safety boots, all that sort of stuff.
You then go to the mine building where you pass through a series of airlocks.
This is because there's a huge overpressure needed
to ventilate the massive tunnel system.
You then get into the lift, which is not an ordinary lift
that you might find in a building.
It's a three story cage
where some of the walls kind of have gaps.
You can see through to the tunnel outside.
The cage, as we call it,
then takes 7 minutes to descend the 1.1 kilometers to the level of the mine.
Once you are there, you then have to walk through
the tunnels to the lab, and that's just over half a kilometer.
Takes about 10 minutes.
Yeah, it does feel otherworldly.
Definitely like walking through the tunnels, the temperature,
the dust in the air, like just the texture of the ground is weird.
It's not something that you're used to.
Feels very stranges sometimes
A lifelong ambition of mine has been to be an astronaut.
And I've imagined myself walking on the moon countless times, but
I think this may be the
closest I ever get to actually walking on the moon's surface.
It really does feel like we're exploring the ruins
of some old alien civilization on a distant planet.
With industry that's just coated in a thick layer of fine powder.
Once you reach the entrance of the lab, you have to
then get clean because you've walked through a dirty mine.
So you have to get changed into the white overalls that you can see us wearing now.
Different hardhat
because we have dirty ones for the tunnel and clean ones for inside.
And then you can come in and do whatever science is that you're here to do.
So in the background of some of this video, you may hear
what sounds like dance music and dance music at precisely 60 beats a minute.
It's not that.
It is behind me the liquid nitrogen plant.
So liquid nitrogen is used in a bunch of science experiments to cool components down.
Normally you just sort of ship it in but because this
is a kilometer below ground, that's a little inconvenient, So...
*machine begins whiring*
they make their own here.
And it just so happens.
The machine operates at a
'dnst'
As Emma said, a whole range of interesting science is done down here,
but of particular interest to me was the research relating to space exploration
and specifically exo biology, because for very specific reasons
this mine is a very good approximation to the red planet.
It's shockingly similar to Mars in some ways.
I often hear people ask like if you're doing space research
have you not gone the wrong way?
Because obviously, you know, we're underground.
We believe that on Mars there used to be surface water.
We haven't found liquid water yet.
There's ice at the poles, but we believe there used to be surface water features
that have at some distant point in the past, evaporated.
So those kind of conditions are
the same as what led to the formation of the salt in the caverns here.
So, you know, ancient sea evaporated, left behind some salt,
if there are caverns in that salt on Mars in the just below the surface,
then that would make this even closer to the sort of conditions that we'd expect
it does feel a little bit childish sometimes.
Look at this cool rock I found, but
*ha ha hah ha*
So what information about the life that existed in the ancient sea
can you infer from what's left in the salt?
You can like directly look for these micro-organisms
Oh really!? Almost like an amber?
sort of, yeah.
So one of the kinds of experiments that they do is you have little hammers
and you crack open the rock and then you put the samples on your
microscope and look for microorganisms, straightforward as that.
So in some cases they are like still visible, even after 230 million years.
To find out more, I spoke to Professor Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh
who has performed experiments in astrobiology at the Boulby Mine.
I mean astrobiology, some people think it's looking for aliens,
but, but astrobiology is simply looking at biology in its cosmic context.
And I know that sounds a bit strange
what I mean by that is it's also looking at the history of life on earth.
We don't have to go look for alien life to know
that there is life on this planet that's fairly uncontroversial.
And so how did it get here?
And how has it been around for four and a half billion years?
And what is the future of life on this planet?
Boulby is, you know, a kilometer or more of salt.
And there's no such environment
anywhere actually else elsewhere in the solar system, ironically.
But having said that, if you go down into Boulby Mine
a kilometer under ground, what you will find is trickles of water
seeping through those ancient salt deposits, quarter of a billion years old.
And those very salty deposits are similar to
what we do observe, what we think we observe on Mars.
Some people think that even in the present day, there is briny water
seeping out from the subsurface of Mars into craters And so those brines in
Boulby might be similar to the sorts of environments that existed on Mars.
Some of these brines in Boulby,
if they flow through the wrong type of salt like magnesium chloride,
they develop chemical conditions that completely prevents the growth of life.
So in other words, if you go into one place in Boulby,
you'll find brine seeps that are full of life.
And then if that brine goes slightly in the wrong direction,
passes through magnesium chloride, the water activity or the availability
of water becomes so low that no life can grow in that brine.
And as a consequence, it's completely lifeless.
It can inform where you might want to go and look for life.
It can inform how you might look for life in those brines.
Let's say that I gave you a sample of a brine on Mars.
You know, how would you get biological information out of that brine?
First thing, I would just stick it under a microscope.
So I'm a bit old school like that.
You know, microbes are easy to see under a good microscope.
So if it was a modern brine.
That's the first thing I would do.
I would stain it maybe with some stain that binds to nucleic acids or proteins.
And I would put it under a microscope and see whether I see little glowing dots.
Then I would try various chemical extractions to see
whether I could extract DNA or DNA like molecules or proteins.
And then I might try and look at the lipids,
the sorts of things that make up cell membranes.
So by looking at the sorts of life that exists in Martian brines,
we can get some ideas
about the limits of life on Mars and what might have limited life there.
But it's, as I say, also about trying to understand the fundamentals.
You know, how does life adapt to extreme environments
and what sort of planetary environments can it live in?
And what sort of environments is it excluded from?
And these are interesting questions purely from a from a biological
point of view, as well as the practical point of view of looking for life on Mars.
I find it fascinating that in order to explore other planets,
we find alien worlds on our own planet,
and that after thousands or tens of thousands of years of habitation,
we're still finding these environments that are maybe just a few kilometers away
from what we think of as our home planet...
...and there are a lot easier to return from than Mars.
I don’t know if you can hear this, there's we're walking into quite a headwind
at the moment, and that's because the mine has to have its air pumped in, right?
So there's a system where the air flows in, circles around them flows out.
So the outflow is really hot.
And I was just told that if you're lost, if your light dies or whatever,
good tip
walk into the wind
because it means you’re near...
the exit shaft.
Boulby hosts many fascinating research projects
Martian exo biology being just one of them.
Another key area of study, one kilometer below the Earth's surface is dark matter.
But what is this stuff?
And how are physicists at Boulby trying to find it?
Well, I've made a whole second video about that over on Nebula!
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Thank you for watching the video all the way through.
I really hope you enjoyed this one.
I hope that it communicated
just how much of an amazing alien experience it was to go to Boulby.
I had a fantastic time making this video.
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Thanks again. I'll see you in the next one.