The river runs through it

From M, fall 2003

Across the river from downtown Minneapolis and the Mill City Museum, the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) sits just below the Stone Arch Bridge. Part of the University's civil engineering department, SAFL continually experiences water in the basement--and its occupants are delighted.

The laboratory houses all kinds of research involving water and wind, and it serves clients worldwide. Venture into its heart, and you'll find a space nearly 200 feet long where water diverted from the Mississippi runs through, obeying gravity, en route to a reunion with its parent river at the building's downstream end. The water is used in scale models of river channels and can help predict the performance of structures like bridges and power plants. Current models show how vegetation affects river channel formation and vice versa, and how removing a dam will affect downstream sediment transport.

Wind also runs through SAFL. Its wind tunnel can generate airflows to study the mechanics of flight for birds, bats, and insects or how wind moves through a downtown. The tunnel is now revealing how wind carves the landscape and modelling future climates and local weather.

SAFL's piece de resistance, Jurassic Tank, is a 30,000-gallon model for sedimentary basins like ocean floors. Its moniker comes from its ability to mimic, in a few days, geological processes that take hundreds of millions of years. Its purpose is to aid the wise development of groundwater, fossil fuels, and other buried resources. Jurassic Tank helped SAFL garner one of the University's largest awards--$14.06 million from the National Science Foundation to study the forces that sculpt Earth's surface.