Week 8 at the Pole

Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 12:15pm
landscape
Image: B. Kuo Tiong, IceCube/NSF

There’s work and then there’s play. And sometimes play can take a lot of work. Like building an igloo at the South Pole, for example—check it out. You can see it in progress during construction, above, and the view from inside, looking through the “sun roof,” after completion, below. The IceCube winterovers had cold temperatures and wind chills (below -60 °C) for their work, too, which was also outdoors this week. They performed a snow survey, in which they had to measure the height of all the posts located over the IceTop tanks (IceTop is the surface component of the IceCube detector).

igloo
Image: B. Kuo Tiong, IceCube/NSF

winterover
Image: F. Pedreros, IceCube/NSF

winterover
Image: F. Pedreros, IceCube/NSF