It’s always a white Christmas at the South Pole. It was also summer solstice at the Pole, and the winterovers got outdoors for some nice shots of the station.
IceCube researchers at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), a research center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recently found that IceCube is capable of seeing GZK neutrinos in a much larger portion of the sky than previously thought, thanks to an effect called tau neutrino regeneration. The researchers also used tau neutrino regeneration to eliminate a possible explanation for anomalous events detected by another Antarctic neutrino experiment, ANITA.
Why are the winterovers playing chess out on the ice? The answer might just be a question itself—why not? Yes, it’s cold outside...but you just can’t let the weather get in your way.
Last week, long-awaited cargo arrived, and just as exciting, the South Pole traverse also showed up. The traverse travels overland to bring fuel to the Pole that would otherwise need to be flown in.
IceCube was running smoothly last week. But it hasn’t been such smooth sailing this year for cargo arrivals (delays). On the plus side, a supply of IceCube beanie hats arrived!
Since it’s summer at the Pole, more people are arriving than leaving. However, last week two people departed who had been at the Pole for an extended time—yes, we’re talking about Benjamin Eberhardt and Kathrin Mallot, IceCube’s winterovers for the past year, shown here among the red parkas walking toward the plane above.
A plane landing in daylight means summer season and new arrivals at the South Pole. So far things have started off busy for IceCube’s new winterovers.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego; and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison successfully completed a computational experiment as part of a multi-institution collaboration that marshalled all globally available for sale GPUs (graphics processing units) across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform.
Two fresh faces have arrived at the Pole—IceCube’s next winterovers, John Hardin and Yuya Makino, ready for service. Here is the plane that brought them, a low-flying Basler.
Things "warmed" up a bit at the Pole last week. And there were sun dogs back in the skies and some interesting snow formations on the ground.