While Burj Dubai and other manmade towers are scraping the skies, a new scientific facility is taking the world into unprecedented depths. In the town of Lead in South Dakota, the world’s deepest subterranean science laboratory has broken ground.

Scientists and other personalities gathered on June 22 to dedicate Sanford Underground Laboratory. The laboratory will be constructed in a 4,850-foot chasm deep in South Dakota’s Black Hills. At its deepest, the underground complex plummets 8,000 feet below ground.

Construction is set to go on full swing this July. Workers there will stabilize the caverns, build infrastructures, and, most importantly, pump out water. Geologists will also come to test minerals.

Sanford Lab is essentially converting a once-thriving gold mine, which had hosted a research facility before. The Old Homestake Mine was where Nobel Prize winner Ray Davis Jr. carried out his experiments concerning solar neutrinos in the 60s. After over a century of occupancy, the mine went into a hiatus in 2001.

When Sanford Lab opens in 2016, scientists would have a place conducive to proving the existence of “dark matter.” The corresponding experiments entail pitch darkness, away from cosmic rays. For their initial jaunt, scientists will toy with a 300-kg LUX (Large Underground Xenon detector). They will attempt to trap the ethereal substance in this vessel.

T. Denny Sanford, the lab’s namesake, largely bankrolls the project, which ultimately costs $550 million. Additional funds from Congress are expected for the installation of two additional labs in the complex.

Theoretically, dark matter comprises a vast portion of the universe. Scientists believe it would provide immense insight into the creation of the universe. Dark matter supposedly originated the primordial “Big Bang” explosion that conceived the cosmic bodies. If anything, dark matter may answer the question whether the universe is shrinking or expanding.

While its existence could only be inferred at best, dark matter is said to possess no atoms. No light or radiation supposedly emanates from it whatsoever. Electromagnetic forces only have a negligible effect on it.