IceTop Over the next few weeks, a team of University of Delaware researchers will be at work in one of the iciest, coldest, most austere places on the planet: South Pole, Antarctica. Currently stationed at the South Pole are UD researches Thomas Gaisser, Stoyan Stoyanov and James Roth.
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Adventure Continues!
Hello, all! I left South Pole Station yesterday on time. I was lucky again to get to ride in the cockpit of the C-130 all the way from Pole (NPX) to McMurdo (MCM). I think I now have more flight time in the cockpit of a C-130 than I do in a Cessna! I really need to remedy that and finish my pilot license!
A C-17 was scheduled to do an airdrop at South Pole Station today. Then they were supposed to stop in McMurdo and pick us up for our trip to Christchurch (CHC), New Zealand. It was already canceled until tomorrow. The adventure continues! Wish me luck getting home.
-- James Roth Comments [0]
Hello, all! I left South Pole Station yesterday on time. I was lucky again to get to ride in the cockpit of the C-130 all the way from Pole (NPX) to McMurdo (MCM). I think I now have more flight time in the cockpit of a C-130 than I do in a Cessna! I really need to remedy that and finish my pilot license!
-- James Roth Comments [0]
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Weather or not!
When I first arrived here, we had temperatures of -40° or lower every day. During the last week, there has been a warming trend. The temperature has warmed to -24°C, but the wind has picked up. Yesterday, the winds were at 26 knots. All of the pictures I have sent so far showed blue skies, but add 26-knot winds and you have a whiteout!
With the bad, comes the good. Ice crystals blowing in the air cause an atmospheric phenomenon called a Sun Dog. It is a rainbow-like halo around the sun. It is a spectacular site!
These conditions are normal at the South Pole, so work continues. Despite the weather, yesterday we filled our 28th and final IceTop tank for the 2007/08 season. This was a remarkable season! We filled 28 tanks in 9 days. This is the most tanks we have deployed in a single season. This also makes a total of 80 IceTop tanks, which marks the half-way point for the IceTop project construction phase. It is now up to Mother Nature, and our freeze control units, to freeze the water into perfectly clear cosmic ray detectors.
Leonard Shulman arrived this week. He will assume the duties of monitoring the freezing process and solving any problems that may arise. Stoyan and I are scheduled to leave Pole tomorrow for McMurdo. On Tuesday, a C17 cargo plane is scheduled to do an airdrop at the South Pole. This is only the second airdrop ever attempted by a C17 at Pole. I was here for the first drop last year, when I took this photo. If the airdrop goes as scheduled, the C17 will stop in McMurdo to pick up passengers. Stoyan and I are on that list. There is a possibility that they won’t land in McMurdo, in which case our next opportunity to fly north is on Dec. 20. Wish us luck in making it home for the holidays!
-- James Roth Comments [0]
With the bad, comes the good. Ice crystals blowing in the air cause an atmospheric phenomenon called a Sun Dog. It is a rainbow-like halo around the sun. It is a spectacular site!
These conditions are normal at the South Pole, so work continues. Despite the weather, yesterday we filled our 28th and final IceTop tank for the 2007/08 season. This was a remarkable season! We filled 28 tanks in 9 days. This is the most tanks we have deployed in a single season. This also makes a total of 80 IceTop tanks, which marks the half-way point for the IceTop project construction phase. It is now up to Mother Nature, and our freeze control units, to freeze the water into perfectly clear cosmic ray detectors.
-- James Roth Comments [0]
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Glad to go, but sorry to leave
The routine for leaving South Pole calls for checked baggage to be packed and available for collection in the hallway of the station at 7:30 p.m. the day before scheduled departure. This year, everything went according to schedule, which is not always the case.
Monday, December 10, was my departure day. I joined the morning planning meeting as usual. We discussed how to accomplish the ambitious schedule of filling the remaining 20 IceTop tanks in the week before James and Stoyan both leave.
Drilling the second deep hole of the season is just starting, so deployment of detectors in the deep ice will not happen again for a couple of days. This freed several people to help with IceTop. We decided on two crews, one for filling tanks and one for opening the four tanks that were filled on Saturday. James and Stoyan went to fill tanks. I went with the tank opening crew to show them how to put up sunshades on the tanks and open them so the water can begin to freeze. It will take about 40 days to freeze these tanks.
On the way out to the work site I heard the announcement that the passenger flight took off from McMurdo with expected arrival time at South Pole of 11:30. At ten I came back to pack my carry-on bag, strip the bed, and clean my room. After good-byes to my IceCube colleagues, I boarded the LC-130 Hercules for the three-hour flight to McMurdo. I was glad to go, but sorry to leave.
After we took off, I took a picture of the South Pole Station, with our IceTop work site in the foreground. There's also a photo of the Trans-Antarctic Mountains out of the cockpit.
Terry Hannaford, the cargo manager for IceCube, was on the same flight. (He's shown with my colleague James Roth in the top photo. Terry is on the left.) After supper in McMurdo, we reported for “bag drag” to check in for our flight to Christchurch the next day.
We are scheduled to fly this afternoon (December 11) with about 50 others on a C-17 cargo jet to Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tom Gaisser, UD Research Team Leader Comments [0]
Monday, December 10, was my departure day. I joined the morning planning meeting as usual. We discussed how to accomplish the ambitious schedule of filling the remaining 20 IceTop tanks in the week before James and Stoyan both leave.
After we took off, I took a picture of the South Pole Station, with our IceTop work site in the foreground. There's also a photo of the Trans-Antarctic Mountains out of the cockpit.
Terry Hannaford, the cargo manager for IceCube, was on the same flight. (He's shown with my colleague James Roth in the top photo. Terry is on the left.) After supper in McMurdo, we reported for “bag drag” to check in for our flight to Christchurch the next day.
We are scheduled to fly this afternoon (December 11) with about 50 others on a C-17 cargo jet to Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tom Gaisser, UD Research Team Leader Comments [0]
Friday, December 07, 2007
Most of you have read about IceCube or IceTop earlier in this series. For those who haven’t, we are building the world’s largest Neutrino Telescope here at the South Pole. Neutrinos are incredibly hard-to-detect particles, so we need a really big detector. IceCube, when finished, will use a cubic kilometer of South Pole ice to capture the light signal left by neutrinos that have passed entirely through the Earth. Neutrinos point directly back to their source, so they will help us map the Northern sky in ways that have never been seen before.
IceTop is the surface array of the IceCube Project. IceTop helps IceCube to find the neutrinos that have passed through the Earth by filtering out the cosmic ray particles that enter the Southern atmosphere. IceTop uses tanks of perfectly clear ice to detect these cosmic ray particles that enter the atmosphere above it.
It sounds easy to make ice at the South Pole, but everything at -40°F is a challenge. In order to make clear ice, we must control the freezing process. We need to remove the dissolved gases from the water to avoid cloudy bubbles, and we must allow for the expansion of freezing water to avoid cracks. We have, in previous seasons, produced 52 of the 160 tanks of clear ice required to complete the project. This year we will add 28 new tanks to the array.
The process, here at the Pole, is to dig a trench for two IceTop tanks. We then place the tanks in the trenches. Surface cables supply power and communications from the central IceCube lab to the trenches. Freeze Control Units (FCUs) are installed at each tank, and the tanks are filled with filtered Antarctic water supplied by the IceCube hot-water drill. The FCUs do their job to produce a 1 meter deep by 2 meter diameter block of clear ice with two detector modules in each tank.
Yesterday, Dec. 5th, we prepared the first two IceTop tanks for filling. This is a milestone for us! It has taken Tom Gaisser, Stoyan Stoyanov, and me nearly a month to prepare for this moment. Today, we will fill the first two tanks and the process will continue each day until the 28 tanks are filled. We will closely monitor the freezing process for the minimum 40 days required to freeze each of the 650-gallon IceTop tanks.
James Roth Comments [0]
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Safety First
At South Pole Station, we are over 2,000 miles from advanced medical care. We have a medical lab that is quite capable for such a small facility -- it has to be! We are constantly reminded, however, that serious medical emergencies will require extreme measures. Safety and accident prevention is emphasized and reviewed from the time you arrive on the continent. Today at South Pole, we had a mass casualty drill. I was tasked as an observer in the medical facility, which is referred to as “Club Med.”
Remember, the following was a simulation…
Around 4:30 p.m., the simulated alarm sounded in the new station. Teams of emergency personnel responded immediately! A man, Michael Kleist, was down at our Ice Cube Lab (ICL). He was shocked while accidentally cutting into a live cable. Twenty minutes later, as responders dealt with the emergency, a second call came in that our own Stoyan Stoyanov had fallen into an IceTop trench and received a serious head injury. He was unconscious! The complications of multiple accidents at multiple locations, not to mention being under the most extreme of conditions, was challenging for the rescue teams. Stoyan was at a very remote location that most are not immediately familiar with. The training paid off! Mike arrived at Club Med in the station only 30 minutes after onset of the incident. Stoyan was transported by snowmobile, on a backboard on a sled, to the elevated station. He arrived at medical only 23 minutes after the call. Without practice drills like the one today, South Pole Station would not be at the level of readiness that it is to handle a real emergency.
All rescuers, team members, observers, and managers met in the gym 15 minutes after the exercise. All aspects were reviewed in detail to improve on the successes and to expose any weaknesses. It was clear that every member of the exercise took their job seriously and the goal was the mutual safety of all on station. I was impressed!
James Roth Comments [0]
Remember, the following was a simulation…
Around 4:30 p.m., the simulated alarm sounded in the new station. Teams of emergency personnel responded immediately! A man, Michael Kleist, was down at our Ice Cube Lab (ICL). He was shocked while accidentally cutting into a live cable. Twenty minutes later, as responders dealt with the emergency, a second call came in that our own Stoyan Stoyanov had fallen into an IceTop trench and received a serious head injury. He was unconscious! The complications of multiple accidents at multiple locations, not to mention being under the most extreme of conditions, was challenging for the rescue teams. Stoyan was at a very remote location that most are not immediately familiar with. The training paid off! Mike arrived at Club Med in the station only 30 minutes after onset of the incident. Stoyan was transported by snowmobile, on a backboard on a sled, to the elevated station. He arrived at medical only 23 minutes after the call. Without practice drills like the one today, South Pole Station would not be at the level of readiness that it is to handle a real emergency.
All rescuers, team members, observers, and managers met in the gym 15 minutes after the exercise. All aspects were reviewed in detail to improve on the successes and to expose any weaknesses. It was clear that every member of the exercise took their job seriously and the goal was the mutual safety of all on station. I was impressed!
James Roth Comments [0]
Friday, November 30, 2007
Antarctic View
Today, I was working on the edge of our IceTop array and took the opportunity to walk out a few steps beyond. The picture shows the vast Antarctic plateau, more or less in the direction of Newark, Del., which is about 9,000 miles away. The altitude here is about 10,000 feet, and there is very little precipitation. We are high and dry. The wind sculpts the characteristic pointed structures in the snow known as sastrugi, as shown in the close-up.
The scale of this detail from lower left of the photo at right is about 10 inches. There can be much bigger features, depending on recent wind speeds. We have had a run of good, sunny weather with low wind the past few weeks.
Tom Gaisser Comments [0]
Today, I was working on the edge of our IceTop array and took the opportunity to walk out a few steps beyond. The picture shows the vast Antarctic plateau, more or less in the direction of Newark, Del., which is about 9,000 miles away. The altitude here is about 10,000 feet, and there is very little precipitation. We are high and dry. The wind sculpts the characteristic pointed structures in the snow known as sastrugi, as shown in the close-up.
The scale of this detail from lower left of the photo at right is about 10 inches. There can be much bigger features, depending on recent wind speeds. We have had a run of good, sunny weather with low wind the past few weeks.
Tom Gaisser Comments [0]
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
A South Pole Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was a normal working day at the South Pole, and it was quite productive for our sub-group of IceCube. The main part of IceCube is about a mile deep in the ice under the snow-covered surface. It consists of cables almost two miles long with 60 detectors, each inside a rugged glass pressure vessel, spaced 50 feet from each other on the lowest part of the cable. On the surface above each “string” of deep detectors is a pair of 600 gallon tanks. Our group from UD is responsible for this array of detectors on the surface, called IceTop. On Thanksgiving Day, we placed ten tanks in their trenches at five of the locations where holes for the deep detector will be drilled later this season.
The next day, we used a ski-mobile with a sled attached to carry the optical modules out to the tanks and install them. These are the same detectors used in the deep ice, and they work the same way in our tanks. We hang two optical modules in each tank. Later, the tanks will be filled with water. We freeze it carefully to avoid bubbles so that we end up with a clear tank full of ice in which the optical modules are immersed. When a cosmic-ray particle goes through the ice, it makes a flash of light that is registered by the photomultiplier and digitized by the computer that is contained inside the optical module above the photomultiplier.
We celebrated Thanksgiving with dinner on Saturday, November 24, and a two-day weekend. James and 20 or 30 other volunteers peeled potatoes for the festivities, and a somewhat smaller group made the pies. The celebration culminated on Saturday with three seatings for Thanksgiving dinner, starting at 3:30 in the afternoon.
In the morning, I volunteered in the kitchen, first carving turkeys and then washing dishes for brunch. James Brown, the executive chef at the South Pole, made 16 roast turkeys as well as some smoked ones and even a deep-fried turkey. This was the fifth November in a row that I’ve had Thanksgiving dinner in the galley at the South Pole. It was quite a nice occasion.
Tom Gaisser Comments [0]
In the morning, I volunteered in the kitchen, first carving turkeys and then washing dishes for brunch. James Brown, the executive chef at the South Pole, made 16 roast turkeys as well as some smoked ones and even a deep-fried turkey. This was the fifth November in a row that I’ve had Thanksgiving dinner in the galley at the South Pole. It was quite a nice occasion.
Tom Gaisser Comments [0]