The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  * * *

  Gary wasn’t bothered in the least by the lack of sunlight. He says he has probably never felt as content or mentally fit. The simple life suited him. There were no bills to pay, no traveling to do: “You get up in the morning, you check your experiments, you eat, you work, you [do some] recreation, you sleep.” He’d taken his electric guitar along, and there was another guitarist and a bassist on the crew, so they trained Robert to play the drums and put a band together, which they named Fire on Ice. They would practice up in Skylab, far enough removed from the dome that they could make as much noise as they wanted. Gary had also taken a Swahili phrasebook along, so he made a desultory attempt to teach himself that rhythmic language, and Robert took it upon himself to teach a German class, which attracted about ten students. They also got way into photography. There was a darkroom in the dome where they could even develop color slides. Robert’s shots of the aurorae have since become quite well known, although everyone agrees that a photograph can’t possibly do justice to the actual experience of standing under an aurora on the Ice.

  This was also an excellent retreat environment for thinking about physics. Gary began writing Monte Carlos to simulate the atmospheric neutrino signal from the northern hemisphere, which was expected to be the first signal that AMANDA would see once they figured out how to use it. This is a “diffuse” rather than point-like signal: it’s spread all over the northern sky. He has since become one of the collaboration’s main experts on diffuse neutrino signals of all kinds and on statistical inference.

  * * *

  Pretty much every holiday is marked with a party, generally involving plenty of booze: St. Patrick’s Day, sunset, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July. Midwinter’s day, the solstice, June 21, is a unique holiday for the denizens of the frozen continent. The day of deepest darkness is celebrated with a festive banquet, at which a letter of greeting and commendation from the president of the United States is always read. That year they held a barbecue on Labor Day. They held “Christmas in July” on the twenty-fifth. They threw a toga party for no reason at all.

  But it wasn’t all fun and games. There were two relatively scary fire alarms. One occurred at two in the morning, when a scientist named J. D. Mayfield, who was working out at MAPO, noticed some smoke in the building. (J. D. may have been what they call “free cycling.” In contrast to the support personnel who report to work on a fixed schedule, the scientists can work whenever they want, and with no sun to guide them sometimes slip into a completely untethered pattern of sleeping and eating. In Darryn Schneider’s year there was a fellow named Yama who lived out at MAPO. Darryn would carry his meals out to him. Yama became skilled at cooking feasts on a hot plate that was otherwise employed to cure epoxy and even used it to heat up the goodies for the party he hosted at sunrise.)

  The two a.m. alarm launched everyone straight from their beds. The fire crew, which included Gary and Robert, hopped into a snowcat and raced out of the garage arch into a snowstorm and full-on whiteout conditions. (“Someone commented that it looked like the Batmobile coming out of the Bat Cave as these doors sprang open and do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do and this thing goes flying out of there,” Gary recalls.) The driver, a heavy equipment mechanic, was navigating with a spotlight, and all they could see was white. They finally found the flag line and followed it the half-mile to MAPO, getting updates from J. D. by radio, who discovered by the time they arrived that the flue to the building’s furnace had become clogged with ice. They cleared it and went back to bed.

  Near the end of winter, they almost realized their greatest fear when one of the engines that drove the main electrical generator blew up and the entire station lost power. A valve dropped into one of the engine’s cylinders, and it spewed pieces hot of metal around the power plant building. The building filled with steam, and the fire alarms went off. They couldn’t get the emergency generator started, so it became a race between starting the spare and getting the main one running again. Power was down for about four hours.

  * * *

  The coldest temperatures arrive about a month after midwinter, in July or early August. And a certain few look forward to the first time the temperature drops below -100 Fahrenheit with great anticipation, as it affords the first opportunity to join the legendary 300 Club.

  When the temperature drops below 100 below, the aspirants of this select society set the temperature in the station’s sauna to 200 Fahrenheit and warm up inside wearing nothing but winter boots. Gathering their courage, they dash madly out the doors and into the cold and sprint back to the sauna. “For extra stupidity points,” writes Darryn, “you could go all the way to the Geographic Pole.” In Gary and Robert’s day, the roundtrip was about five hundred yards, and it was getting shorter every year, because the movement of the Ice was carrying the station closer to the pole. The point of nearest approach occurred several years ago, so the trip is now getting longer. This will undoubtedly be an important consideration when the next station is built, two or three decades from now.

  Gary and Robert actually did a practice run, protecting their most sensitive appendage with pairs of shorts, but on the day of the real thing Gary just couldn’t bear the pain. He reports that Robert and two other “knuckleheads” did manage to touch the flag at the geographic pole and return to the sauna, screaming in agony. Over the next several days, one developed blisters on one of his hands from minor frostbite.

  Evidently, it doesn’t hurt if you fall in the snow, because your skin is so warm that it melts, and although everyone is afraid of frostbite to the lungs (some believe it’s safer to walk than to run, so you won’t breathe so hard), the worst respiratory effect seems to be a minor form of “lung burn.” The “cold, dry air parches the trachea, leaving it red and engorged,” and “sufferers end up coughing up blood and mucous.” A wintering doctor once observed that in the aftermath of the 300 Club, the station “sounded like a TB clinic.”

  * * *

  Round about August, most everyone is suffering from winterover syndrome, a dysfunctional mental state “characterized by varying degrees of depression; irritability and hostility; insomnia; and cognitive impairment, including difficulty in concentration and memory, absentmindedness, and the occurrence of mild hypnotic states known as ‘long-eye’ or the ‘Antarctic stare.’”

  At Pole, it’s known as being toasted. “I’m toast,” or, “He’s toast,” the saying goes. In Darryn Schneider it manifested in its “irritability and hostility” form, and he made no bones about it. “Toasty, adj.,” he wrote in early August in the weekly e-mail he sent to his friends in the real world. “The state of being forced to tolerate the presence of one or more idiots all the time. Advanced state of being in Antarctica too long; as, to be completely toasty.” His curmudgeonly-ness had no effect on his work, so it wasn’t a problem. The touchy-feely, group-hug approach doesn’t play well at Pole. People who don’t get along simply avoid each other. “Problems are not swept under the rug; they are placed under it very deliberately,” writes one observer. “It’s the art of containment, rather than resolution, that gets Polies through the eight-month-long night.”

  Psychologists and social scientists have been studying the syndrome for decades. It was first observed in 1898 by the redoubtable Dr. Frederick Cook, when he still had the good name he eventually lost by faking a first ascent of Mt. McKinley in Alaska and staking a false claim to being first to reach the North Pole. An archly intelligent man in addition to being a con artist, Cook was the physician on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1877–79, which became the first ever to winter in the Antarctic region when their ship, the Belgica, got trapped in the sea ice near the Antarctic Peninsula. Besides noting the change in behavior among his colleagues during the long polar winter, Cook also discovered that he could cure them of scurvy by feeding them freshly killed meat—seal and seal blubber, mostly, which he went out on the sea ice and hunted himself.

  A good part of the scholarly interest in the syndrome arises from
the obvious similarity between wintering over and spending extended periods of time in space. The Antarctic Treaty, incidentally, which governs the peaceful international use of the continent, is seen as the template for the laws that may govern the colonization of the Moon and distant planets.

  Neither Gary nor Robert got toasty in the least. (Maybe it was the lack of alcohol. The output of the still was known as “toast juice.”) And Robert, after twelve winters, is famous for being utterly immune to the syndrome. In the same e-mail in which Darryn Schneider flaunted his own irritability, he referred to Robert as “Super Bert.” In 2008, Robert applied to be an astronaut with the European Space Agency. He made the first four cuts, which whittled an initial group of 10,000 applicants down to 192, but was eliminated there.

  At McMurdo, where they must be more intellectual or something, it’s known as T3 syndrome, as in “having a T3 moment.” This phrase comes from a recognized physiological condition known as Polar T3 syndrome, apparently related to winterover syndrome, in which the thyroid hormone T3 is suppressed. Interestingly, aside from an increase in moodiness and a decrease in overall cognitive function, this syndrome also leads to a need for more food and an increased ability to withstand the cold. The studies also say that they get it worse at McMurdo than they do at Pole. Surprisingly, the more severe the environment, it seems, the lower the incidence of depression.

  There’s a marvelous depiction of T3 syndrome in Anthony Powell’s documentary. In one scene, he catches himself looking awfully bedraggled, sitting with his elbows on a table, chin on one hand, staring across the room in stupefied silence, unaware that he is filming himself, while his tablemates wave and make faces at the camera. One fellow describes putting his boots on the wrong feet, taking them off, and carefully putting them back on the wrong feet again.

  Whatever they call it, the people who’ve studied it find that it isn’t caused by the darkness or cold so much as the psychological and emotional stress of being isolated from family and friends and confined to a small space for a long time. Not surprisingly, loners handle it well, while the ones who really go off the deep end are those who lose the respect and friendship of their co-workers and become completely isolated.

  The upside of this dalliance with madness is that it turns out to be good for you. Studies have demonstrated a tempering effect: people who have wintered in Antarctica visit hospitals less in subsequent years than similar groups of people who have not.

  * * *

  One morning in late July as they walked out to MAPO, Gary and Robert thought they discerned a faint brightening on the horizon. A week or so later they were sure, when a few of the faintest stars in Orion began to disappear.

  On about the eleventh of August, the three women in the Stitch and Bitch knitting club made an all-call from the Skylab lounge to announce a distinct orange hue on the horizon. (All-calls are broadcast from intercoms all through the station.) This was quite early for such a thing, so there was some suspicion that they’d been drinking, but when about fifteen people crammed into the lounge, they saw it too. By midnight that night it was extremely bright, and several people gathered on the snow near the dome to marvel at it.

  Next morning it was gone. A skeptical astronomer, who must have slept through the whole thing, suggested that it might have been a mass delusion, but Gary and Robert silenced him by posting some pictures in the galley.

  They began to stand under the stars with a wistfulness now, since their sublime night was coming to an end. A definite brightness began circling the horizon. Orange and red began coloring the sky. Sunrise took a couple of weeks, and the disk finally appeared three days before the equinox, thanks to the bending of rays at the horizon. They dressed Skylab up like a South Pacific island and themselves like pirates and held a sunrise party, replete with Beach Boys tunes. It was a bit too crowded to do much dancing.

  Daylight revealed massive snowdrifts around the buildings in Summer Camp and the dark sector. Many of the flag lines they’d planted in the fall barely peeked from the snow. Their final task was a conflicted one: to bulldoze and shovel out the buildings, open up Summer Camp, and clear a runway to welcome the hordes that would bring their exquisite solitude to an end. It was a joy to greet old friends and read letters from family and eat the first fresh vegetables in six months, but for the first few days a fair fraction of the winterovers sought refuge in their rooms to escape the din of the crowd or snuck their plates off to secret spots in the dome that only they knew in order to share a few last meals together.

  * * *

  AMANDA might have felt the same way. For in those days winter was a peaceful time for the instrument as well. No one was adding to it or monkeying around with it, so it could simply take data. Gary and Robert’s main job was just to keep the instrument running, and by Gary’s account it ran pretty well. In fact, that winter, unbeknownst to anyone in the collaboration, AMANDA detected its first gold-plated neutrinos.

  14. The First Nus†

  Back in the real world, rumors were circulating that the AMANDA collaboration wasn’t capable of picking up-going events out of their down-going haystack or, worse, that the instrument was too unstable to detect anything at all. By the time Gary and Robert left the Ice, the collaboration had supposedly possessed a working instrument for about a year, AMANDA-B4, but had no physics to show for it. Francis was becoming increasingly anxious to produce results—and privately harboring his own doubts as well.

  They had a good excuse, since even they couldn’t see their data for about a year after any new version of the instrument was deployed. John Jacobsen hadn’t written his polechomper program yet, so there was no way to send data north in winter. The winterovers stored it on tapes at Pole, so it didn’t become available until the austral spring when someone found a chance to carry the tapes north.

  Again, research is when you don’t know what you’re doing. They had only a vague idea of how they were going to grapple with this inchoate mass of information. Since they didn’t know exactly what an up-going muon was going to look like in their instrument and didn’t want to miss any, they programmed it to cast as wide a net as possible as they squeezed the raw data down to a manageable size and saved them. The computers in MAPO stored “events” based on a loose set of criteria set by various “triggers,” the most basic of which saved an event whenever a certain number of phototubes—eight or ten—lit up within a certain, short period of time. There were also coincidence triggers set up with SPASE, the air shower array on the surface, and AMANDA-A, up in the bubbles, in order to “veto” events that occurred during down-going muon air showers detected by those instruments.

  The first, large and loose dataset would need to be calibrated, using the data from the laser flashers that Steve Barwick obtained every February—always in a panic as they prepared to leave the Ice at the end of summer—and the calibrated data would need to be purged of obvious noise “hits.” The next step would be to filter out the air shower and obvious down-going events, leaving an enriched and significantly smaller dataset, which would be put through a sequence of more intelligent “cuts” in order to find muon tracks, reconstruct their direction, and pick the up-going events, signifying candidate neutrinos, out of the pile. The prospects were daunting, not least because the physicists knew in advance that down-going muons would outnumber the up-going by a factor of about a million.

  John Jacobsen seems to have been the first to try to put the whole ball of wax together, sometime in 1995, before AMANDA-B4 was even deployed. Although he didn’t get far, the effort put him right on top of things when B4 began taking data on February 19, 1996. He asked someone to carry one day’s data north by hand at the end of the season, so he could begin playing with it, and he got it February 21, so whoever it was must have been under some pressure, as the last Herc of the season couldn’t have left Pole long after that.

  In Madison, he and Serap Tilav collaborated on what she calls “our first attempt [at the] full chain of data processing.” And DUMAN
D’s DNA was also present at the creation, since John used an animated “event viewer” he had borrowed from the Hawaiian project—a software application that produced visual displays of the events as they unfolded in time—to pick out five “interesting events” by eye. No one would have seriously argued that they represented actual neutrinos, but he and Serap had gotten the ball rolling.

  The problem was also attacked by three students in Germany, the most energetic and visible of whom was a post-doc named Christopher Wiebusch. Christopher had an extraordinary amount of experience for a person of his age, having worked on three other neutrino telescopes before taking his position in Zeuthen. He had first entered the field as a diploma candidate at the Rhine-Westphalia Institute of Technology in Aachen, under the tutelage of a mysterious character by the name of Peter Bosetti, now deceased, who was another example of the sort of wild type attracted to this pioneering field.

  Sometime in the 1980s, Bosetti and his then girlfriend initiated a DUMAND spinoff named JULIA (Joint Underwater Laboratory and Institute for Astroparticlephysics), after her daughter. In January 1991, Christopher got his feet wet in this business by joining them on a sea voyage in a German research vessel named the Sonne, aimed at deploying a short detector string in the Mediterranean Sea.