Every austral summer (November-March) several thousand people travel though Antarctica on behalf of the United States Antarctic Program. The United States maintains three permanent bases on the continent (McMurdo, Palmer, South Pole Station) and also supports many other field camps for the duration of the summer. Although the only purpose of the US presence in Antarctica is scientific, every aspect of life on Antarctica has to be imported which means the logistics are equivalent to a large military operation in the harshest weather on earth.

Travel to Antarctica begins in New Zealand. There, in warm paradise, amidst the kiwis and other flightless birds, the US government issues you extreme weather gear from thick socks and underwear to boots and snow goggles. Everybody is given a bright red jacket so that people can be easily identified against the whiteness of Antarctica. Because of Antarctic logistics, all travel in Antarctica is handled by the US Air Force. Just recently, the Air Force started using C-17 jets to fly from New Zealand to McMurdo Station which has cut the flight time from 9 hours in a propeller driven C-130 to 5 hours. Weather delays are frequent though and it is a badge of honor to fly all the way to Antarctica only to "boomerang" back because of an unexpected storm. Of course, once you are beyond the point of no return, you are beyond the point of no return.

McMurdo Station is located on the coast of Antarctica and is reachable by icebreaker. It is the place where Robert F. Scott established his base camp and the hut he built is still there filled with one hundred year old cocoa tins and hanging seal skins. Because of the relative ease of reaching McMurdo it has become the central base for the US and most scientific missions are supported from here. Compared to other bases and field camps, there is quite a bit of wild life in McMurdo. Skuas (the seagulls of Antarctica) and seals are relatively common but penguins are very rare. If you want to make a weather hardened Antarctic veteran angry, ask him how many times he's seen a penguin. Of course, the day after I left McMurdo, the penguins showed up. Luckily, some of my friends were traveling there and took pictures so I could share in their joy. Maybe it's for the best that I wasn't in McMurdo for the penguins. If you touch a penguin the US Antarctic Program bans you for life and it's pretty hard to resist giving them a little poke.

Most visitors to McMurdo are transients on their way to somewhere else. I stayed there for several days on my way to and from the South Pole. Unlike McMurdo, which is reachable by icebreaker and can go above freezing in the summer, the South Pole is a frozen desert sitting on 3km of ice and has never recorded a temperature above -13 celcius. The Air Force uses their work horse cargo plane, a ski-fitted C-130, to fly almost all personel and equipment to the pole (recently they did the 900 mile journey by land to prove the feasibility). In the next post I'll write about the South Pole.

This time last year, I was working on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory as a grad student. The experiment is located at the South Pole and I traveled there to deploy the instruments that I was working on. I spent Christmas and New Years there along with 200 other humans, 900 miles away from anybody else. The experience was awesome.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a massive "telescope" which uses the ice at the South Pole as a target for neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles which are very difficult to detect- in the time it took you to read the last sentence about one billion neutrinos passed through you without any interactions. The goal of IceCube is ambitious: to produce a sky map of these hard-to-detect particles. In particular, IceCube is looking for neutrinos of extremely high energies which are produced in astronomical events such as gamma ray bursts and supernova explosions. Because neutrinos are so difficult to detect, IceCube's strategy is to capture them by instrumenting 1 km^3 of ice at the South Pole. Even more ambitiously, IceCube uses the earth itself as a noise filter. The telescope is embedded in the ice underneath the South Pole and looks downwards for the only particles that could possibly travel upwards through the entire earth, neutrinos.

There is no way I can do the project justice in such a short blog post. Even something as mundane as the 3km holes that IceCube drills in the ice are fascinating. Every part of the experience from going to Antarctica to deploying the instrumentation itself was amazing. Over the next series of blog posts, I'd like to get into more detail on the experiment and write a bit about Antarctica as well. In the mean time, if you want to learn more about IceCube check out the project's home page. Also, please send me an email and let me know if I messed up some details or if you'd like to hear more about something in particular.

Here is a video I made for my family from the pole.

I just received this picture from South Pole Station, Antarctica and I had to share it. The guy wearing an Octopart t-shirt is Mike and he is an electrical engineer for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (he's also a friend of ours). He's at the South Pole right now probably huddled in a field tent splicing wires at -30 deg celcius. Thanks Mike and Justin!!

This picture is especially meaningful for me because the box he is standing with is the laser I was working on in grad school. It is also the laser that started Octopart. As I was building it, I found it really frustrating to find the right parts and devices for it. Sam had a similar experience with his projects so we started working on Octopart at night to try and make our day jobs easier. Now we are coding full time but I'm still nostalgic for that period. As of yesterday the laser is buried 2km below the surface of the ice and it will never be seen again.

Ironically, I was in the middle of writing a blog post about IceCube when I received this picture. I'll hold off on that post for another few days. If you have any cool pictures of Octopart t-shirts doing battle with the elements, with soulless grizzlies, or with short circuiting soldering irons please email them to me! If you need a t-shirt to give to your mother for Christmas, send me an email as well.