The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  * * *

  Dave Nygren had been wise to send such an accomplished engineer to the Ice. Jerry “only appreciated later how much I learned along the way.” By participating in deployments and cable drags, by watching the static arc across the room from his fingers, and just by sitting in MAPO watching AMANDA and the Amandroids at work, he picked up many details that he would fold into future designs.

  His biggest take-home message was that dropping one of these basketball-sized pearls into the Ice was similar to sending a satellite into space: once you let it go you’d never see it again. His need to reprogram the chips taught him that the DOMs would need to be programmable from the surface after being deployed, just as satellites are designed to be reprogrammed from Earth after they are launched. This would take “some pressure off of the software team to be infinitely clairvoyant.”

  Several times while he was working in MAPO he watched every single optical module in AMANDA light up simultaneously, and he guessed that this was a false signal created as the entire building released a huge load of static electricity into the air. By digitizing the signals down by the phototubes themselves, far removed from the static and radio noise at the surface, he knew that the DOM would be able to measure the light signals in the deep ice far more accurately than the analog circuitry in AMANDA ever would.

  His third important lesson came from watching Steve Barwick, an experienced physicist and a professor no less, fiddle for days with lasers and fiber-optics, trying to calibrate the instrument. (Steve had eventually called off his strike, as he always did.) Not only did calibration require an expert, it was time-consuming and inaccurate and the instrument couldn’t take data while it was being done. An important cosmic event, such as a supernova, might be missed. Jerry and Dave Nygren resolved to find a way to make the DOMs capable of calibrating themselves automatically.

  * * *

  The winterovers for 1997 were Gary Hill, an Australian who had just earned his doctorate at the University of Adelaide, and Robert Schwarz, a German diploma candidate at the University of Munich. This was the first Antarctic visit for both, and for both it was a life-changing experience.

  Robert is now known as “iceman.” As I write, he is about to complete his twelfth winter at Pole. Amazingly, however, he is not the clear record-holder in that regard: a fellow named Johan Booth has spent the same number of winters there, as well as an additional six at the U.S. Palmer Research Station on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula. Robert does hold the record for the most time spent at Pole altogether, however, since he’s spent more summers there than Booth has.

  Gary had a relevant background. He’d done his graduate work on a Cherenkov detector in a lake in a volcanic crater in Australia (which was never built, because the lake was too shallow). Initially, he hesitated about “wintering,” but Bob Morse won him over by offering him a two-year post-doc in Madison after he came off the Ice—and Gary turned out to be a keeper; he’s still with the project. He’s easy to get along with, he’s calm under pressure, he’s made enormous hands-on contributions at Pole for the past two decades, and he’s made significant contributions to the science as well.

  In those years, when the dome was still the heart of the station, the winter team was limited to twenty-eight. They met in Denver in mid-September to become acquainted and begin developing an esprit de corps. Personality profiles were taken; everyone was interviewed by both a psychologist and a psychiatrist and took a written psychological test. There were ropes courses and a fire school, since a winter fire at Pole is probably the most horrifying possibility one can imagine. Gary remembers “actually crawling around in burning buildings,” searching for dummy victims and dragging them out. He loved it.

  He and Robert traveled to the various institutions to get to know their new colleagues and learn about their winter tasks, and they headed south early to get oriented in what would be their austere home for the next twelve months. They were swiftly recruited to Albrecht’s deployment team.

  The winterovers are the elite of the summer crew, although one tends to regard them warily, wondering what could possibly possess a person to do such a thing. In fact, however, they are generally the sanest people at Pole, for the main reason that they have to be.

  These two started out with the full AMANDA experience, since their first deployment involved the exhausting “un-deployment” as well. And Gary had a second memorable experience right on its heels. Always the sort to lend a hand, he decided to help the drillers detach the drill head as they raised it out of the second hole at the end of the drilling.

  “No hardhat, I just wandered in and didn’t think of that. They were rocking the drill back and forth to shake off ice and water, I think. As it was lifted out, the tip of the long pipe extensions must have been just clear of the hole when some bolts up higher gave way, and the bottom section of the pipe dropped straight down, hit the ground vertically, then fell over toward me, hitting me on the head in a glancing blow as I ran away. I was decked to the snow with a pretty long gash on the head and lots of blood everywhere.… Anyway, in the end they shipped me off to biomed, where Hugh [the station doctor] stitched me up.

  “After that, I was confined to biomed and ordered not to fall asleep, just in case something would go wrong while I was asleep and I’d just die without warning. I might have stayed awake for another twenty-four hours or something. Fortunately, people brought movies.… I still have a pretty cool scar on the head, and now I buzz the hair back to a number one or two sometimes. It looks pretty scary!”

  So much for Albrecht’s transition to organization. It was the wild, wild west.

  Gary recovered, and he and Robert took over as deployment leaders once Albrecht left the Ice in mid-January. All in all, it was a successful season. They managed to sink six strings into the ice and complete the epochal incarnation that became known as AMANDA-B10.

  13. Night on the Ice

  There may not be an obvious change in the weather. The date is always up for grabs. Winter at the South Pole begins at a very definite moment and with a flourish, as the last LC-130 rumbles along the runway, lifts and banks for a low pass over the station, slowly shrinks to a dot, and disappears.

  Most of the winterovers go outside to watch. They tend to greet this moment with relief, since it usually marks the end of a period of sustained panic. There’s always a last-minute rush to get the final necessities to the station, both for surviving and for doing science, and to get the last summer residents and whatever else out. These last escapees are usually frazzled, too, since the most likely reason they’ve hung around has been to finish some essential and unwieldy task under a shifting but unyielding deadline.

  Suddenly it is silent. There’s an all-hands meeting. And the traditional kickoff to their eight or nine months of solitude is to watch a triple feature of relevant horror movies: The Thing, in which the scientists at a polar research station are terrorized by a shape-shifting alien—both the classic 1951 version, which takes place in the Arctic, and the 1982 remake, which takes place in Antarctica—and “Ice,” an episode of The X-Files in which a research team on an Alaskan ice sheet is infected by an extraterrestrial parasite that induces fits of murderous rage. In Gary and Robert’s year they made it a quadruple feature by watching The Shining, too. (The famous face shot of a crazed Jack Nicholson used to be posted here and there around the station.) That movie is now a midwinter tradition, from what I understand.

  Some then commence a figurative escape to McMurdo, the idea being to cover 850 miles on either a treadmill, a rowing machine, or a stationary bicycle before the station reopens for summer. That would be an average of about three and a half miles a day.

  * * *

  There’s a saying at Pole that what happens on ice stays on ice, and there is an honorable tradition against helping outsiders or passers-through—fingys—truly understand the life there, especially the life in winter. I encountered this tradition when I visited the place for six weeks near the end of 1999
. Many of the old-timers were openly derisive of my “book research,” and once they found out who I was would pointedly clam up when I entered a room. Part of the time, I worked with the “redneck beakers,” the PICO drilling crew. One day I entered the Jamesway that housed the water boilers, looking quite the journalist in my spanking-clean ECW gear with my camera dangling from my neck, and one of my co-drillers, a friend I think, a guy named Jed, who had worked as a gold miner in South America, looked at me with a smile and said, “We’re here seeking fortune, not fame.”

  In respect of that tradition we will not delve too deeply into the stories of that winter. (There are thousands of them. Gary says there’s at least one every day.) It is perfectly fine and indeed noble that some things about so sublime a place should remain hidden. I can say, however, that Gary and Robert became fast friends and that the scientific and career fruits of that winter have been highlights of their lives so far.

  They were an unusual pair at Pole in that neither drank alcohol. For the bar in the old dome, a dark place on the second floor of the galley building, steeped in tradition, was the beating heart of the station. It was also the only place where people were allowed to smoke. About the only ways to escape from the boredom of the place (aside from sex, if you were one of the lucky few who had that option; relationships lasting only the winter are not uncommon) were drinking and watching videos. It is probably fair to say that the U.S. government used to subsidize alcohol abuse at Pole, and probably at the other stations as well. When I was there, the beer was cheaper than it was in the real world, and I heard stories of runs on different types of liquor—with the goal of drinking all the tequila in the store, for instance—that had occurred the previous winter. There was a secret still for making moonshine somewhere in the dome, and it is said that at least one belligerent alcoholic used to crop up every winter. The previous year, in fact, “a worker was thrown into detox three times before he was finally forced to live in the medical facility, isolated from the rest of the population.”

  * * *

  Robert and Gary were minding a grand total of five related experiments. AMANDA was their main responsibility and required the most time. The others were SPASE, GASP, and two new ones: RICE (Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment), yet another feasibility study for detecting neutrinos with radio antennae, and VULCAN, an array of air Cherenkov telescopes that worked in conjunction with SPASE. VULCAN was the dream child of Alan Watson, the dry-witted Scot from Leeds. He tells me that he and some friends came up with the acronym one night in a bar: Very Un-Likely Cherenkov Array Name.

  After getting into the swing of things with their horror movies, the winter crew took most of the next day off and then got to work battening the hatches against the approaching cold. They cleaned and closed Summer Camp, they set lines of flags across the Ice to guide them to the locations they would need to get to in the dark in blowing snow when winter deepened, they stowed the equipment and vehicles they would not need. Much of it was stored outside and would need to be dug out of the drifted snow come spring. There was a separate category labeled “DNF”: Do Not Freeze, for items that had to be kept in heated buildings.

  They slowly settled in to their routines …

  * * *

  The sober lifestyle of the two AMANDA winterovers wasn’t the only thing that was good for their health; their commute helped, too. In contrast to the “dome rats” with desk jobs, who had no compelling reason to go outside, they had to walk back and forth to the dark sector most days, and for the most part they enjoyed it. The majority of their actual work took place inside MAPO or Back of Science, but they did have to work outside occasionally, especially on GASP and VULCAN.

  One is especially aware of one’s location on the planet and even to a certain extent the solar system when one lives at the South Pole. Solstices and equinoxes carry more meaning than they do elsewhere, and the equinoxes are especially vivid since they are accompanied by sunrise and sunset.

  As the station closes for winter, all signs point to sunset, the autumnal equinox south of the equator, which comes only a few weeks later. Robert calls this “the time of the long shadows.” What photographers know as “magic time,” the hour or so after sunrise or before sunset, when colors are most alive, extends for several weeks. In a weekly report in March 2002, AMANDA winterover Katherine Rawlins wrote, “The Aeolian ripples in the snow are cast by the low sun into bold relief. It’s quite beautiful, really.”

  The Sun circles counterclockwise, parallel to and just above the horizon, lower every day, making the complete circuit every twenty-four hours. It undergoes strange transformations as it prepares to disappear, changing shape and color and sometimes setting and reappearing several times.

  Anyone who has hiked up a mountain knows that air temperatures usually drop the higher one climbs. At Pole it’s other way around. The cooling effect of the oceanic ice sheet creates a temperature inversion in which the coldest, densest air lies at ground level and the higher layers become successively warmer and less dense. Optically, this creates a kind of prism at the horizon, which separates the different colors of light given off by the Sun. The denser air lower down is like the thick part of the prism, bending the light more sharply than the upper layers. As atmospheric conditions change, the qualities of the prism change with them, and this is what causes the distortions in the shape and color of the disk. The bending of the light also allows the disk to be seen when the Sun itself is actually below the horizon geometrically.

  The color that is bent least is green. This leads to the so-called green flash, which appears at lower latitudes as a momentary flash of green just as the Sun disappears. At Pole the flash can occur repeatedly for hours and even days.

  Darryn Schneider, who wintered for AMANDA in 2000, was watching closely as the top sliver of the disk disappeared:

  At around mid-day the sun was getting very low on the horizon. We could only see the upper limb, and this was all distorted into a flat disk shape with jagged edges. Every so often bubbles would come off the top before popping into nothing. As the sun got very low, so that it [was] nothing more than a line on the horizon, small dots of green appeared above the sun, blinking like a traffic light, until finally the sun disappeared. Zach and I had a beer to celebrate the start of winter, only to the see the sun rise again slightly as it went past the very slight rise in the horizon. Now we know—the horizon isn’t quite as flat as it looks!!

  They held a sunset party that night. But the next morning, when Darryn got up early to walk to MAPO, lo and behold, the Sun was back! He checked on it all day while he worked: “I could see the shapes the sun was being distorted into quite clearly. With binoculars I could see it changing very quickly—growing taller—being sliced by dark lines—the edges all jagged—and every so often a line or bubble of green on top.”

  That night they gathered in the Skylab lounge, a small room at the top of a five-story tower adjacent to the dome, which afforded a 360° view of the polar plateau:

  We suddenly become sun worshipers, sitting in chairs staring at it. The green on the very upper edge is the brightest I’ve seen it so far—bars of it appearing every so often. Even blues are visible. With the telescope it’s an amazing sight. While the air looks fairly clear, the presence of ice crystal[s] is obvious from the faint sun pillar that extends a fair distance into the sky.

  This time it disappeared for good.

  * * *

  While the star that gives us life plays the leading role in the drama of the seasons, the Moon becomes the gentle monthly companion in winter. It rises above the horizon for two weeks and disappears for the same duration, alternately illuminating and darkening the landscape. When the Moon is full and the sky is clear, it is quite possible to walk to the dark sector without a headlamp. Owing to the whiteness of the snow, the altitude, and the unparalleled clarity of the air, night is probably brighter on the Ice than it is anywhere else on the planet.

  The most affecting memories for nearly every winterover ar
e those of the dark days when the Moon is down and the sky is at its most sublime. The stars shine brightly in the high, clear air; some twinkle back and forth between red and blue; and the Milky Way resembles an elongated, richly textured cloud stretching from horizon to horizon. The most arresting sights are the aurorae: green, violet, or all the colors in between, shimmering and shape-shifting, sometimes covering half the sky. In New Zealander Anthony Powell’s superb documentary, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, a woman wintering at McMurdo Station describes being so overcome by the beauty of the night sky that she drops to her knees without realizing she has done so, and finally coming to only when she is released by the spell.

  * * *

  Any outside work is of course severely hampered by the cold. For one thing, you have to bundle up pretty well. In addition to the predictable heavy clothing, gloves, and boots, it is necessary to cover every square millimeter of skin, and everyone comes up with his or her own unique way of doing so. Robert and Gary designed special hoods made of fleece that covered their entire heads, had cutouts for their eyes and mouth, and were long enough to be rolled into sumptuous gators around their necks. They wore goggles over the eyeholes and breathed through sort of broken-off snorkels that kept the condensation outside the hoods, so it wouldn’t fog up their goggles.

  At one point during their winter, when the Moon happened to be down, they noticed that one of the VULCAN detectors wasn’t working. They went out in the dark, detached the garbage can−shaped object from its cables, lifted it out of its stand, and carried it into MAPO to try to diagnose the problem. Couldn’t find anything. Took it back out and hooked it up. Still didn’t work.

  Shining their lights around, they noticed the end of a cable sticking out of the snow. Gary guesses that one of them had hooked it with his foot and snapped it while walking out to the array. They decided to put new connectors on the two broken ends in order to reconnect them. It was a coaxial cable, which uses a relatively cumbersome connector that takes five or ten minutes to attach even in a warm, well-lighted lab. You need a razor blade and a crimping tool. The temperature was -70 Centigrade. After about fourteen tries and sixteen hours, they gave up and decided to run a new cable, but this wasn’t straightforward either. They couldn’t carry a reel outside and spool the out cable, because it would freeze and stiffen in the cold. So, in the warmth of MAPO, they cut the required length of cable and attached the right connectors to it, and Robert took one end over his shoulder and dragged it down the stairs and out an open door onto the Ice, making sure to walk in a straight line toward the detector, while Gary payed out the cable from inside the building. In the end, a job that would have taken a single person about fifteen minutes in the real world took two people about two days.