It was a rather busy week at the Pole. Besides people coming and going, there was the first IceCube webcast of the season, with a school from Wisconsin and two schools from Greece joining the event. An unexpected fire drill was also held last week. It turned out to be a timely drill, since the next day a genuine fire alarm sounded, triggered by a faulty oxygen sensor, not by an actual fire. […]
Decades ago, the aspiration to build a kilometer-scale neutrino detector at the South Pole seemed farfetched; today, we celebrate the 5-year anniversary of this incredible achievement. Shortly after 6 pm New Zealand time on December 18, 2010, the final sensor was lowered into the ice. This completed the decade-long construction effort that started with the design and fabrication of detector systems and concluded with the installation of the final string of sensors. […]
We’ve discussed sastrugi before, but this one deserves special attention for its shape. It sure does look like a frozen finger, doesn’t it? And it’s pointing the way to IceCube. […]
The number of IceCube personnel at the South Pole station during the past few summers is nothing like it used to be. Back in the days of detector construction, the number of staff on the ice would be in the double digits at this point. Instead, this week’s current count is six, including the recent arrival seen in the photo. […]
We weren’t kidding that there are a lot of training sessions for activities at the Pole. Last week saw some more training—fire fighters in search and rescue missions. Afterward, they all lined up for a group photo on the stairs outside the ICL. […]
In a new study by the IceCube, Pierre Auger, and Telescope Array Collaborations, scientists have looked for correlations between the highest energy neutrino candidates in IceCube and the highest energy cosmic rays in these two cosmic-ray observatories. The results, submitted today to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, have not found any correlation at discovery level. However, potentially interesting results have been found and will continue to be studied in future joint analyses. […]
There are training sessions for just about everything that goes on at the South Pole. Dropping cargo from an airplane is no exception. Last week, a C-17 performed the annual air drop training, shown here against a spectacular blue-sky backdrop just after releasing its cargo, which can be seen as a tiny speck off to the left, slowly parachuting to the ground […]
A steady wind shows the flags at the ceremonial South Pole aligning themselves quite neatly. Flying conditions were good for most of the week, with several incoming flights bringing more summer visitors to the Pole, including the first IceCube team members to join the winterovers this season. […]
Clear weather allowed most of the scheduled flights to make it to the Pole last week, with a stream of new arrivals from each plane. Inside the galley, the new summer crowd and the few remaining winterover staff do a good job of filling up the space. […]
New results submitted today to the Astrophysical Journal are the outcome of a combined search for neutrino point sources performed by the ANTARES and IceCube collaborations. No source has been identified, but the combined search improves the sensitivity to point sources by up to a factor of two, which delivers more stringent upper limits on the flux for the candidate sources considered in this analysis. […]