Last week was the third annual “Bermingman,” where folks go out into the berms to dig for buried treasure. Things are buried because of accumulated snow, not from actual snowfall but from storms and winds that blow in and deposit snow. In fact, just after the Bermingman, a huge wall of snow appeared on the horizon […]
If you didn’t have snow over your holidays, you can enjoy it vicariously through these South Pole pictures. They had all kinds of fun in the snow—sledding and tubing, snowmobiling, and running! The sledding worked up their appetite for celebrations. […]
Last week was a busy one at the Pole. A lot of holiday preparations and some visitors on station, including folks from Arctic Trucks, getting a station tour and giving tours of their vehicles. […]
Although fast radio bursts’ (FRBs) progenitors are supposed to be compact and perhaps catastrophic cosmic events that may also produce neutrinos, IceCube has not detected any such neutrinos that could be associated with a known FRB in six years of data. These results are far from precluding the eventual detection of neutrinos from FRBs in the future, but they have set the best limits yet on how many are emitted. The results have been submitted today to ”The Astrophysical Journal”. […]
There’s always something going on at the Pole, and last week was no different. On the fun side, the winterovers got in some outdoor photography—well, technically indoors for this shot of the icy stairwell down in the fuel arches […]
The many flight delays this season affected the arrival of not only personnel but cargo, too. It eventually showed up though, and last week IceCube’s winterovers were busy managing it all at the IceCube Lab. It was a lot of carrying and exhausting, but they were still smiling after it was all said and done […]
It was a busy week for IceCube’s newest winterovers. A plane arrived after a long hiatus, bringing some new folks to the station and taking away last year’s winterovers, finally. But much of the excitement came from alarms going off—the ones for fire were false alarms thankfully. But it gave the new winterovers a chance to apply their training to emergency response operations. […]
Last week kept IceCube’s newest winterovers busy, but not too busy, with a number of activities. Johannes was on call, and got his first page to deal with a detector issue, but not too big of a problem. Both winterovers were trained on the PistenBully, or snowcat, and then drove around to the IceTop stations to take snow height measurements. […]
Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that are famous for passing through anything and everything, only very rarely interacting with matter. Now, scientists have demonstrated that the Earth stops very energetic neutrinos—they do not go through everything. The study is published online today by the journal Nature. […]
Flight canceled? Well, that happens. But, canceled … again? Welcome to plane travel at the Pole. The changeable weather patterns in the harsh climate of Antarctica make flights in and out susceptible to delays. It’s part and parcel of the whole experience. […]