Not everyone celebrates Christmas in July, but they do at the South Pole station, where traditions prevail. Last week started off the festivities with the appearance of a tree and presents in the galley. More activities and decorations are planned for upcoming weeks. The weather was nice and cold as a fitting complement to the […]
For those who spend a year living at the South Pole, they are treated to glorious night skies in the winter season. Last week was a case in point, with displays of bright auroras, lots of stars, and glimpses of the Milky Way. Winterovers also get to experience a multitude of South Pole station traditions […]
Last week at the Pole it was all about the sky. There were days with perfectly clear skies and some of the brightest auroras of the season. If the photo above seems to suggest a little wizardry action behind the aurora, it might be a result of watching too much Harry Potter—the station organized a […]
It’s getting close to midwinter, when people in Antarctica, and other places, celebrate the southern winter solstice. In anticipation, South Pole station personnel took some group photos (above is one of them) to use as midwinter greeting cards, traditionally shared with other Antarctic stations. Last week at the Pole, IceCube’s winterovers spent a lot of […]
While most of us up north are enjoying longer and brighter days as summertime gears up, the South Pole remains settled in winter. The image above of frosted and snowed-in IceCube drill towers is a wintry scene indeed. Though, to be fair, the drill towers were rather snow covered in summer as well. (Here’s an […]
Some weeks are busier than others, and last week was one of them, at least as far as the IceCube detector goes. There were just a number of issues that seemed to arise one after the other, like hard drive errors and DOM warnings—nothing IceCube’s intrepid winterovers couldn’t handle. But if you’re going to be […]
Bad weather last week at the Pole meant more indoor photos than outdoor photos. But starting with the out-of-doors, the image above shows the front of the station entrance with a snowdrift that had built up after only a few days of heavy winds. They had to carve a passage through the drift for people […]
The main activity occupying IceCube’s winterovers last week was running DOM calibration on all of IceCube’s in-ice modules, a big effort compared to their usual task of calibrating just the IceTop DOMs. Besides other work on the detector, they also had emergency response training and put in some time helping deep clean the galley chairs […]
IceCube winterover Hrvoje, who took the photo above, was excited to see the sun coming up again at the South Pole, except…that’s the moon and not the sun! (Of course, he knew that all along.) But what an illusion, this image of the moon—it could fool anyone. And the moon has played such games before. […]
First up—last week featured a weather balloon launch. That’s IceCube winterover Marc lending his assistance. He also spent some time helping out with preparations for a repair to one of the power generators. A trip to the South Pole power plant is always an interesting visit. Last week’s activities also included some detector troubleshooting, a […]