Last week there were a few alarm calls in the cryo building. The first one interrupted an outreach webcast, and then there was another one later the same day. The photo shows the emergency response team on their return from one of those calls. You can see that the sun is still out, just a few degrees above the horizon. […]
On a clear sunny day, it’s easy to make out the buildings at the end of the road to the Dark Sector, but the flag line is set up for the winter months, when darkness and extreme temperatures reign and you really can’t afford to get lost out there. […]
The third edition of the IceCube Masterclass hosted over 200 students at 10 institutions in Belgium, Germany, and the US. Madison (WI) hosted the first edition in Spanish, attended by 28 Hispanic high school students. Masterclasses were held on March 2 and March 9. […]
There’s a beautiful half moon in this image, can you spot it? Well, it is a little small in the photo—but sometimes we don’t notice the moon out during the day because we’re not expecting it. However, we shouldn’t be surprised see it then, since it’s often visible. […]
The IceCube Collaboration is updating the cosmic ray anisotropy maps using 318 billion cosmic-ray-induced muon events detected in IceCube between May 2009 and May 2015. The larger data sample allowed discerning new regions in the anisotropy maps, which shed some light on the physical processes that stir up the variations in the arrival direction of cosmic rays. These results have been recently submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. […]
Chairs and sofas (and mattresses!) have been set up in the gym, all for the sake of movie-watching comfort. It’s unclear how they vied for best seats. But some padding or support is imperative when you’re going to hunker down for three movies in a row—or rather, three versions of the same movie. Yes, we’re talking about The Thing, the traditional entertainment springboard to ring in the beginning of the winter season at the South Pole. […]
A cloud of snow dust appears in the wake of the last flight out of the South Pole for the season. Well…almost. It was supposed to be the last flight, but unforeseen circumstances (they do crop up every so often) caused a few summer personnel to delay their departure a few more days. Delays can be a nuisance, but so close to the end of the summer season, they’re even more likely to produce anxiety since in winter there’s no leaving the Pole once the last flight has gone. […]
Maybe we should all do this with our packages from now on. Mail and cargo arrived last week, and someone set out the contents of one of the boxes quite decoratively for the photo. To efficiently unload the goods when they arrived, they formed an assembly line going up the stairs to the station. […]
The detection of the first gravitational wave (GW) event by LIGO represents one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of recent years. After receiving the gravitational wave alert in September 2015 from the Advanced LIGO detector, the IceCube and ANTARES neutrino telescopes analyzed the data they had recorded at the same time in order to search for neutrinos that might have been emitted from the same event. Neither search identified any neutrinos that could be associated with the burst. These results set the first limits on neutrino emission from a GW transient event. […]
Last week, the South Pole traverse finished unloading the supply of fuel it had brought, transferring it all to the tanks on station. They should be all set for winter, which is long at the South Pole and is fast approaching. […]