The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  In the epochal year 1987, Pomerantz and a droll Scot by the name of Alan Watson (a member of the Leeds team that had made the false but fortuitous Cygnus X-3 “discovery”) installed a cosmic ray detector named SPASE (South Pole Air Shower Experiment) at the pole. Pomerantz’s Bartol colleague Tom Gaisser, who had previously collaborated with Francis Halzen, participated in this experiment as well.

  Bob Morse points out how science begins to move in a new direction: “You get this sort of subcritical mass of stuff boiling around.… Everybody’s sort of dabbling in everything.” He was talking to Lynch about trying out the Haleakalā idea at the pole; Pomerantz and Watson started SPASE; John Learned was pretty much everywhere; Trevor Weekes, the leader of the team that would soon detect gamma rays from the Crab Nebula, was interested in setting up a telescope at the pole similar to the one he already had running in Arizona; and Francis Halzen was traveling the world trying to rustle up interest in solid-state DUMAND.

  Economic politics also tilted in a helpful direction. In 1989, partly in response to a perceived economic threat from the advancing technological knowhow of Japan, the National Science Foundation began funding so-called Science and Technology Centers: centers of excellence in specific subject areas, usually run by universities, where the foundation would invest in infrastructure and advanced instrumentation that could be used by research teams from around the country. Part of the idea was to spin off any new technologies that might result into the private sector.

  In June 1989, Pomerantz chaired a conference at Bartol for the express purpose of setting up a Science and Technology Center named the South Pole Astrophysics Research Center (SPARC) at his institute. Although SPARC never came to be, this was an epochal gathering. Many pioneers in particle astrophysics attended, including Learned, Watson, Weekes, locals Tom Gaisser and Todor Stanev, and, of course, a healthy contingent from Madison. Morse presented his idea for Haleakalā at the pole, and Francis gave what was now his standard talk on neutrino astronomy. Near the end, he suggested “that field investigations begin as soon as possible to examine the relevant optical properties of deep Antarctic ice. It is amusing to envisage the Antarctic ice sheet as a giant neutrino telescope, with the whole earth as its rotating neutrino bandpass filter.”

  This time the pollen found receptive flowers in two grad students from Berkeley named Doug Lowder and Andy Westphal. They had come to Delaware with their mentor, Buford Price, chairman of the Berkeley physics department, to present a balloon experiment they were planning to launch over the upcoming Antarctic summer, just a few months away.

  Buford is a courtly southern gentleman with an unusually broad range of interests, scientific and otherwise. He speaks Russian, for example. He was trained in solid-state physics and early in his career invented new methods for recording the tracks of nuclear decay products in solid materials. This led to investigations of the ancient tracks left by decay products in natural materials, most prominently mica—and thence into geophysics. (The tracks in ancient rocks act as signatures for radioactive constituents that have long since decayed away.) He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences at a young age and was one of the few investigators to be awarded samples of the “Moon dust” brought back by the Apollo astronauts. He, Lowder, and Westphal were planning to send a new glass-based track-recording device into the air above Antarctica in order to study the isotopic composition of heavy, iron-related elements in cosmic rays. This might help determine whether supernovae, which are essentially exploding balls of iron, are a source of the cosmic rays produced in our own galaxy.

  It is unclear whether Lowder and Westphal actually spoke to Francis after his talk; if they did, he doesn’t remember. He was still a theorist, after all. He jetted out of Delaware and continued on his merry way.

  The seasonal cycle in Antarctica begins to pace the story.

  * * *

  The U.S. Amundsen-Scott Research Station at the South Pole (“Pole” in Antarctic-speak) is about 850 miles from the nearest station, McMurdo, the hub of U.S. operations, which is on the coast of the continent. And the safest and most convenient way to get to Pole from McMurdo is by air.

  Since 1988, air support between McMurdo and Pole has been provided by the 109th wing of the New York Air National Guard (which sports one of the best acronyms of all time: NYANG). This is the only wing of the U.S. Air Force that flies the Lockheed LC-130 Hercules transport plane, aka “Skibird,” a turboprop equipped with a unique wheel-ski combination that allows it to land on both tarmac and snow.

  It goes without saying that an LC-130 needs good weather to make the trip to Pole—they frequently “boomerang”: turn back in mid-flight. One specific requirement is that the temperature must be above −50° Celsius or −58° Fahrenheit,* because at that temperature jet fuel, which is basically kerosene, turns to a noxious sort of jello and hydraulic fluid becomes so viscous that the moving parts of the plane stop moving. This limits the working summer at Pole to about three and a half months, from sometime in late October or early November to mid- to late February. When the last LC-130 lifts off and makes its farewell flyby, it leaves behind a skeleton crew of “winterovers” to spend the next nine cold, dark, and to most, sublimely beautiful months in isolation. The winterovers maintain the science experiments and the station itself, and keep themselves safe, alive, and entertained, but they don’t do much in the way of improvement to either the station or the experiments. Most of that sort of thing—and much else—takes place during the short, hectic summer.

  Summer in Antarctica would be winter in Wisconsin. As Francis remembers it, he was sitting in his office one winter’s day, about six months after the Bartol conference, when he “received a call from an irate NSF program officer telling me that ‘two guys from Berkeley had been caught trying to sneak a string of photomultipliers into Antarctica to detect muons in the ice,’ and asking whether I might have put any crazy ideas in their heads. I had in fact never heard of them.…

  “You have to realize, I’m a theoretician; I’m funded by DOE. I’d never talked to anyone at NSF in my life. I get this phone call, a guy shouting at me, and he says, ‘You know what it is to do science in Antarctica? You just don’t run around there.’ I thought, ‘This guy is crazy. He has the wrong number.’”

  It was Lowder and Westphal. Their balloon experiment had been piggybacked onto a field study led by an eminent Caltech geologist named Hermann Engelhardt, and they were shuttling around to various locations on a quickly moving ice stream on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, drilling short, quick holes in order to study the movement of the stream. They had volunteered to help with the drilling in order to get a chance to launch their balloon experiment and had also taken along a simple apparatus built by another of Buford Price’s students, Steve Barwick, in the hope of running one of the “field investigations” that Francis had outlined at Bartol. They planned to lower a light source into one of Engelhardt’s drill holes, drop a couple of photomultiplier tubes into a second hole nearby, turn on the light, and measure the transparency of the ice. They weren’t aware of having broken any rules, incidentally, since Engelhardt had told them it was quite alright.

  The NSF officer soon decided that Francis really was clueless about this little foray, and Francis convinced him to let the renegades have their fun. Ironically, however, they never did run their test, because Engelhardt’s drill broke down before they got the chance. And they had a frustrating season all around, because their balloon experiment failed, too.

  As it happened, Bob Morse made his first visit to Pole that summer, to install a Haleakalā look-alike named GASP (Gamma-ray Astronomy at the South Pole). And it may be emblematic of the soon-to-be-born AMANDA collaboration that, as far as I can tell, its first “pre-meeting” took place in the most popular bar on the continent, Willy Field.

  “The first time I ever met Doug Lowder, I ran into him walking out of the men’s room at McMurdo, at Willy Field,” says Bob. “And so I introduced myself,… and he was not in a ver
y good mood. He said he didn’t want to be in this goddamn place, and the experiment wasn’t going anywhere, and all he was doing was hanging around.”

  It is not unusual to find people in foul moods at McMurdo, which is by far the largest base in Antarctica. For the vagaries of air travel on the continent can leave you stranded there for a week or more on your way to or from your work site. Some say “Mactown” isn’t part of Antarctica at all, since you don’t have to relate to the out of doors much at all when you’re there.

  The coincidences mount. As it also happened, the biannual International Cosmic Ray Conference took place in Adelaide, Australia, that year, and when you come off “the Ice” you fly from McMurdo to Christchurch, New Zealand, and often connect through Australia. Bob Morse stopped in at the conference on his way home. Francis was there, Buford was there, Steve Barwick was there. And one sunny January afternoon, as these four sat together on the lawn by the main building at the University of Adelaide, they resolved to form a collaboration to build a neutrino telescope at the South Pole—Morse being the in-house “expert” on logistics now that he had been there all of once. As a badge of this exalted status he was sporting a large spot of frostbite on the tip of his nose. It seems that Alan Watson from Leeds participated in the discussion, but declined membership in the collaboration. Everyone remembers Doug Lowder as being there, but in fact he was not: “Neither Andrew or I went to that conference,” he writes. “Those guys were sitting back, drinking Foster’s and having a meeting while Andrew and I were down in Antarctica getting the work done.” Or not.

  The upshot was a request by the two professors involved, Buford and Francis, to meet with John Lynch at NSF.

  John had been expecting this. “Here it comes,” he said to himself. He asked his boss, Peter Wilkness, if he’d like to participate, and the answer was, “You bet!”

  In the spring of 1990, Francis, Buford, Bob, and Steve Barwick met with their potential funders in Wilkness’s office at NSF headquarters near Washington. The scientists presented an overview of the project and explained that their first, limited goal was to study the optical qualities of South Pole ice. When the discussion turned to how to do this, Lynch paused and said, “Wait a second. Let’s get Zimmy down here”: Herman Zimmerman, the director of polar glaciology in the Office of Polar Programs, who happened to be the man who had chewed Francis out several months earlier. Zimmerman oversaw all the ice drilling in NSF’s portfolio, not only in Antarctica, but also in Greenland, where the summer season was about to begin.

  The first step would be to drill a hole in the ice, drop some phototubes into it, and see if they could detect down-going muons—just as John Learned had done years earlier for his graduate work in the Cascades. Zimmerman said, “Well look, this is going to be hard at South Pole, but maybe we can get started in Greenland.”

  So they decided to run their first test on the two-mile-high summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The summit is that high for the same reason the pole is, the ice is that thick, and an American team was just commencing a multi-year effort to drill an ice core all the way to bedrock there.

  But how to fund this sneak attack? According to Francis, Zimmerman thought the idea was “so crazy, he could never fund it if it needed to be reviewed.” But Lynch, as a physicist, didn’t consider it quite so crazy and also had a creative solution to the funding problem. A few weeks earlier, he had read about a new mechanism called a Small Grant for Exploratory Research or SGER (“sugar” in NSF parlance), which had a limit of $50,000, could only be used once on any single project, and did not require formal review. Wilkness happily signed off on a full $50,000, which John divided into two grants, one to Madison with Bob Morse as principal investigator, and the other to Berkeley and Buford Price. He is quite proud of having awarded what may have been the first SGER in all of NSF and definitely the first in Polar Programs.

  So the physicists finally got a chance to encounter some honest-to-god ice—and they met Bruce Koci.

  8. Enter Bruce

  The miracle of AMANDA/IceCube is the clarity of the South Pole ice and the ice-genius of Bruce Koci.

  —FRANCIS HALZEN

  As previously mentioned, I first met Bruce in Bolivia, where he was engaged in his other life, high-altitude ice core drilling, with the climatologist Lonnie Thompson. He and Thompson then struck off on an expedition to the Himalaya, and the next one after that, about two years later, was to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, where I joined them again.

  One afternoon in February 2000, after a long day’s drilling, Bruce and I sat together on the sand in the volcanic crater on the 19,000-foot summit of Kilimanjaro. As we leaned against our packs and watched the sun set, he reminisced about his career.

  “I never was in the drilling business to be a driller. I hate machines. Maybe one of the few engineers in the world you’ll ever find that feels that way about them. I hate them.… That’s one of the few times I will ever fly into a rage is over a machine that does something that it shouldn’t do.

  “I’m here for the experience. I came into this thing as a canoeist. I walked out of good aerospace job and decided to go into ecology and then got back into engineering through glaciology, starting at Minnesota. I’ve always come for the place; I haven’t come to do the drilling. I’ll do my damnedest to make sure the drilling goes well, because that means I can go to another good place.

  “I have only a love relationship with rivers or mountains and always ask their forgiveness for our trespass and delving into their inner secrets.”

  * * *

  Growing up in Minnesota, Bruce dreamed of visiting the Canadian Arctic from the age of five. At sixteen, he took the first of about five long canoe trips in Canada, a 650-mile excursion on the Athabasca, Slave, and Hay rivers in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. He became especially enamored of Baffin Island, one of the more awe-inspiring landscapes on the planet, with enormous granite towers sprouting from its many glaciers, and took two long backpacking trips on the island in his late twenties, one of three hundred miles, the other of four.

  After earning an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota, Bruce worked in the industry for a few years, and in 1972, returned to his alma mater to enter a graduate program in wildlife ecology. After obtaining a master’s degree in that field, he switched to glaciology, and this took him back to Baffin, where he worked on the Barnes Ice Cap for four years in a row, occasionally punctuating his field work with kayak trips through the island’s spectacular fiords.

  One of his friends from that time recalled an experience he shared with Bruce on the Barnes in 1976:

  It was our first day on the glacier. We had ridden some miles north to the previous year’s camp to dig out [one of] the snowmobiles buried last season. All was going rather smoothly until, just as we had the machine out and were preparing to start it, a storm blew in. Having never been quite this far north in a raging whiteout, I became mildly concerned with my future. Bruce continued working, not seeming to bat an eye at our impending demise (he was without a doubt one of the coolest customers I’ve ever known). That is, until the snow began to pile up and the machine we had labored so hard to retrieve wouldn’t start. We tried and tried and nothing worked. Finally Bruce gave it one last mighty pull on the starter; the rope snapped in his hand; and Bruce lost it. What then began was the most eloquent rant I have ever heard to this day. He started with the combustion engine. Technology in a general sense took a broadside; man’s hubris; ice; the weather; the meaning of science; and finally to sum it all up, “the sonofabitch who invented the wheel.”

  We laughed all the way back through the whiteout to camp, Bruce leading the way because I was utterly lost. Never has rage found a better poet, or wild places a more gentle champion.

  I suspect that this was the sort of rage Bruce was confessing to on Kilimanjaro. I’m sure they were infrequent, I suspect they were usually laced with humor, and I’ll bet they were rarely directed at a living thing. Lonnie T
hompson once said that Bruce’s distinguishing attributes were “his loyalty, endurance, constancy, creative craftsmanship, disheveled wisdom, and soft-spoken nature.”

  He had an extraordinary memory for numbers and dates. He could summon an obscure specification for a drill he had built decades ago, the number of days it took to drill a certain ice core, how much the ice weighed, or the flow rate of an old AMANDA drill without skipping a beat. His intuition was legendary, and his work sites, his desks, and his person were famously disheveled, but this hid the fact that he was well organized beneath it all and employed rigorous engineering methods in all of his designs and procedures. In the days before calculators and smartphones, he used to carry a slide-rule and tables of logarithms around with him. His intuition was based on a solid understanding of the physics and a firm grasp of the numbers.

  He had not quite earned a degree in glaciology, and was, he recounts, “rapidly running out of time, when all of a sudden I got this call that the University of Nebraska was looking for someone with a degree in engineering and some understanding of glaciology. So I called them up, got hired over the phone in, like, mid-October, and was on a plane two weeks later for the Ross Ice Shelf.”

  The Ross Ice Shelf floats on the surface of the sea by McMurdo Station in Antarctica and provides a stable platform for the station’s airstrip, Williams Field. It is the largest body of floating ice on the planet, about the size of France. Bruce first visited the place over the 1977–78 Antarctic summer.