by Mark Bowen
This was a relief, because the drillers were exhausted. Another problem was that their eighteen-person crew—nine people per twelve-hour shift—was too small. In subsequent years they would hire thirty.
When they pulled the drill head out of the hole, they discovered that they had damaged the so-called weight stack, which acted as ballast to pull the head straight down and give it inertia. This was a set of seventy-five-foot-long metal pipes arranged concentrically around the hose, between the nozzle at the very bottom of the hose and the drill head, which housed the “brains” of the unit: the pressure and temperature sensors, calipers for measuring the diameter of the hole, and so on. Several of the pipes had broken off and were lost somewhere in the hole. That meant it was unusable; they couldn’t even ream it out.
Some months later, back in Wisconsin, they concluded that even at the slow rate they had been drilling too quickly, because the nozzle they were using didn’t melt the ice as quickly as they thought it would. The following year they used a smaller nozzle, which sprayed out the water at a higher velocity and melted the ice more rapidly.
* * *
About an hour after they had powered down and begun to relax into idle mode, Gary Hill and Kurt Woschnagg were hanging out in Back of Science in the old dome, glancing occasionally at two webcams that gave them a view of the area around the hole, half a mile away. The cameras didn’t give them continuous video; they displayed updated stills every ten seconds or so. It was two or three in the morning. They could see their friend Sven Lidström, a Swedish driller whom they’d worked with for years, wrapping up the last few details of putting the drill to sleep. They remember wondering what Sven was doing when he started struggling with a tangle of cables that was lying on the ice and that a couple of frames later he and the cables were gone. They soon learned that Sven had been injured.
In hot water drilling, the water in the hole is continuously circulated back up to the surface and across the Ice to the heating plant, where it is reheated and sent back down. (As I pointed out in connection to the AMANDA drill, more water goes into the hole than comes out in the end, because ice is less dense than water, so the level in the hole will drop and the hole will collapse unless it’s topped up.) A submersible pump is thus lowered a certain distance into the hole and held there, in order to pump water back up to the surface for reheating.
When Sven and his colleagues had closed down the drill, they had pulled everything up by winching all the hoses and cables back onto their respective reels—except one: the electrical cable for the return pump. The pump itself was left hanging over the hole, its hose running up over the sheave or pulley on the tower, which was two stories high, and then down at a slant, under tension, to its reel, perhaps fifty or sixty feet away on the Ice. The electrical cable had been detached from the pump, so its free end was simply hanging from the sheave over the hole. The reel that held that cable was not motorized. At some point during the shutdown, the drillers had gotten tired of turning the reel by hand and begun coiling the cable onto the ground on the “uphill” side of the sheave, between it and the reel, which was locked. It was a heavy cable, at least an inch in diameter and more than 160 feet long, and this arrangement had left it, as several of the physicists later remarked, in a state of “unstable equilibrium.”
Sven had been standing near the coil of cable when he noticed it was moving. The free end had begun dropping into the hole, dragging the rest of the cable with it—and accelerating, as the length of cable in the hole increased and its weight along with it. The coil, which, again, was lying on the Ice on Sven’s side of the sheave, was snaking up toward the sheave. Not necessarily taking all of this in, Sven instinctively grabbed the cable at precisely the wrong moment. He must have been leaning over it as it went taut, anchored by the locked reel. Since the reel was on the ground and the sheave was about two stories above his head, the cable hit him in the chest and launched him into the air. Some witnesses said he went as high as the top of the drill tower, twenty-five or thirty feet. He landed on the metal platform that supported the Tower Operations Structure—thankfully missing one of its sharp corners—breaking several ribs and some other bones, including some vertebrae, and perforating one of his lungs, which then collapsed. A collapsed lung is a serious matter wherever it happens, and in the thin air at 10,000 feet it’s worse.
* * *
Albrecht Karle, Jeff Cherwinka, and the leaders of the drilling crews were in the galley when they heard the news. This was the group that had made the decision to stop drilling, and they were now caucusing about what to do next. Sven didn’t look good when they got to him about fifteen minutes after the accident. He was lying on the Ice in pain and having a hard time talking. He was trying to breathe through an oxygen mask, and to add insult to injury, the oxygen bottle was frozen.
The South Pole regulars responded with their usual competence and character, and Sven benefited from the existence of the new station as well. The medical area was now a small hospital basically, and there were two doctors in residence. He was transported in a van to “biomed,” where the doctors pumped air into his collapsed lung and ventilated him. Meanwhile, BK Grant, the station manager, an old South Pole hand, got on the phone to McMurdo and called for a Herc. When the folks at McMurdo resisted, she got heavy with them: “You find me a plane right now and get the engines running!”
The doctors were still stabilizing Sven when the plane arrived at about eight in the morning, so it had to wait on the Ice for about three hours with its engines running. During this lull, the station came to a standstill. Under the deep hum of the engines, no one could work. Albrecht, who had been exhausted to begin with and doing everything he could to help for the past five or six hours, finally went to his room and broke down: “I was pretty beaten up emotionally, because of, you know, somebody nearly dying on you, who you’ve worked with for years.”
When a van finally pulled up near one of the entrances to the station to shuttle Sven to the plane, everyone went outside in their big red parkas and lined both sides of the path to see him off. There was a second plane waiting when his Herc landed on the sea-ice runway at McMurdo, and he arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand, about twenty hours after the accident. The U.S. Antarctic Program did well. Sven would return to the drilling crew and even go on to winter for IceCube—twice, in 2007 and 2012.
* * *
One of the first things Albrecht did in the lull after the Herc was summoned was to call Jim Yeck. It must have been a Sunday, because he got Jim on his cell phone in Illinois, on his way to church with his wife. Jim had already developed a lot of respect for BK Grant, who worked for Raytheon, and remembers that she gave him much good counsel during this difficult time. He communicated constantly with her and Jack Lightbody at NSF and brought in the leadership at the University of Wisconsin right away, too.
He issued a stop work order, at the same time warning Albrecht to let him know if the order was impeding progress toward getting back to where they could drill again—safely, of course. (“Sometimes people stop work and they sit around and like ‘I dunno…,’” he says.) He had learned on the Tritium Remediation Project at Brookhaven that it’s easy to stop a job; the hard part is getting it started again. The most important question becomes who has the authority to start it, and he wanted to make sure that authority stayed in Wisconsin, with him.
He assigned one of the drilling leaders to be safety officer, but when it got down to it, the man wasn’t up to the job; he thought he’d be blamed or something. “So Gary Hill, who’s always been a good soldier all along the way, very sharp guy, stepped in and helped him do his job in terms of the accident report and the analysis and the photos, and produce a document that could be used as the basis for a decision to move forward with drilling again.” Luckily, a consultant to NSF who was familiar with the drill—he had participated in the testing in Wisconsin—happened to be on the continent. He flew to Pole and helped reassure the foundation from the inside. But there were also the
issues with the drill to resolve.
It was a great help that there wasn’t a fourth bureaucracy involved, as there would have been in the AMANDA days. Albrecht, who was at the center of this effort, had been particularly adamant that IceCube have complete ownership of the drill, and Yeck and the other powers that be in Madison had separated it from the Ice Coring and Drilling Service sometime the previous year.
* * *
It took them about a week to perform the due diligence, write their reports, and, not least, repair the drill and figure out how they were going to run it this time. By then they were definitely bumping up against the end of the season. It takes some time to put a million pounds of drilling equipment to bed for the winter, and it was now several days past the date they had planned to stop drilling, the twentieth of January. But Yeck points out that “you can push it.”
They chose a spot about thirty feet from the first hole and commenced. It didn’t go quickly or smoothly—the water pumps were still turning themselves off and getting worse by the hour—but they did manage to get to 2,500 meters. Then the question became, how good was the hole? Should they risk dropping a string of DOMs into it and possibly getting it stuck? Albrecht, who had his doubts, asked Jeff Cherwinka, who was lying on the floor of the TOS at the time, trying to fix something, if they could possibly run the drill down the hole again in order to ream it out.
Jeff looked up at him as if he was out of his mind. “Albrecht,” he said, “this drill is falling apart. And the people, we’re tired. Either the drill’s gonna give up or the people are gonna give up, but either way it’s not gonna be long.”
They had a tricky decision on their hands: What would be worse? Losing a string? Or making a controlled decision to back off, which would mean chalking up their first drilling campaign as a complete “learning experience”? Sticking their nose into it and seeing what would happen, on the other hand, getting “some facts on the ground and some real experience,” in Jim Yeck’s words, would be a learning experience, too; and that’s generally the best way to go in experimental physics.
The hole wouldn’t wait long; it was freezing in by the minute.
First, Jim decided for himself that he could live with it, it would not be the end of the world, if the string got stuck. He asked Albrecht to estimate the odds that the hole was okay, and Albrecht guessed somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. Jim then gathered a small group that included Bob Morse and Bruce Koci (who was suffering the ill effects of both radiation therapy and chemotherapy) in his office in Madison to think about the problem—without including Albrecht. He wanted to shield him: “I don’t want him [feeling] like he has to justify what he’s doing to a bunch of people that … just came from the coffee shop to tell him what to do, right? Cuz he’s livin’ it. He’s on the battlefield.”
The incomparable Bruce eased everyone’s fears. Evidently, he asked only one question, how long had it taken to drill the hole. When they gave him the answer, he thought for a moment and said, “You could probably deploy a semi-truck in that hole.”
Jim also made it clear to Albrecht that he did not want to tell him what to do. He was trying to support him in making the decision, and he would support him either way—even though, ultimately, it was Jim’s decision to make. After the conversation with Bruce, he sent Albrecht an e-mail saying it would be okay to go ahead and deploy the string. Jim and I once tried to puzzle this somewhat subtle arrangement out, and what we came up with was that Jim took responsibility for the decision (again providing Albrecht with some cover), but that he allowed Albrecht to make it—although “allowed” might be too glib a term, since Albrecht definitely agonized over it.
John Jacobsen happened to fly in to Pole at just this juncture, since he had been named de facto leader of the team that would try to get the string up and running—troubleshooting the software and hardware—if Albrecht decided to go ahead. He remembers sitting in the galley with Kurt Woschnagg and a very concerned Albrecht, poring over the drill data, which was hard to interpret. “Finally Albrecht said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna go. We’re going in,’” John recalls. “That was a very cool and terrifying moment.”
Gary Hill, who had been promoted to deployment manager, was also concerned at first. It started off very slowly—almost an hour to attach the first module. But they picked up momentum and finally got the string deployed after about eighteen hours.
Albrecht puts it as only a physicist would: one string in the Ice was infinitely more than zero!
They invited BK Grant, the station manager, and Jerry Marty, who had managed the building of the new $174 million station, to participate in the ceremonial turning on of the very first IceCube digital optical module. It was Marty who actually flipped the switch.
There’d been some serious drama with the software. A full five years after all the trouble they’d had with the data acquisition (DAQ) software for AMANDA’s digital string 18, they still didn’t have working DAQ software. Jacobsen had had to cobble some code together at the last minute.
It worked on the first try, and IceCube lifted off.
* * *
Amazingly, they had met the limited goals that Jim Yeck had backed off to roughly a year earlier. In the plan they had submitted to the National Science Foundation in the spring of 2004, they had indicated that they would attempt to deploy four strings, but they only committed to one.
They had also deployed four IceTop stations (two tanks each), and this allowed them to detect the very first muon with IceCube on February 7, even before they left the Ice. It was a down-going muon from a cosmic ray air shower, which lit up one of the IceTop stations on the surface and then, in descending order, most of the detectors on the new string. And Dave Nygren’s team soon demonstrated—from their desks in Berkeley on the other side of the world—that they could synchronize all sixty DOMs on the string to within a remarkable three nanoseconds.
* * *
As the summer folks were preparing to depart, Robert Schwarz, who was about to winter over for the fourth time on another project, walked up to Kurt Woschnagg and said, “Well, congratulations. You got one hole in a year. And how many do you want to do altogether again?”
The task did look daunting, especially to the many newcomers to IceCube who had not witnessed the heroics of AMANDA. But Kurt was optimistic. He knew they could pick up the pace; they’d done it before. “If you were there,” he says, “especially after having been planning this for years and years, it actually felt like a great success. The first IceCube string was in!”
21. As Quickly as It All Began …
Jim Yeck says that one of the things they learned that season was humility. At the scale they would need for production drilling, this job was turning out to be more challenging and even more dangerous than they had anticipated. They also found themselves in a bit of a hole, so to speak: behind schedule. Even he was entertaining doubts as to whether they’d be able to build this thing on time and on budget—which is basically his mantra.
In his view, many of the mistakes they made the first year were the simple result of amateurism. His goal was to become professional. So it seems symbolic that right on the heels of that first difficult season, what he refers to as “IceCube Corporate”—himself, Francis, Bob Paulos, Albrecht Karle, Jim Haugen, and some others—moved from their various rabbit warrens around the Madison campus into the shiny new office space he had designed the previous year, and that the AMANDA and IceCube collaborations merged about a month after that. (The only practical effect of the merger was that Steve Barwick had to throw in the towel and join IceCube or else leave altogether.)
* * *
“We put an enormous amount of energy and attention into trying to gather what we could from that [first year’s] experience, to learn what we could,” Jim recalls. “And part of that was soliciting input directly from the people participating? So we interviewed all the drillers as they came off the Ice.”
It had been demoralizing for the drillers—more than four month
s’ work without much success—and they appreciated being listened to and participating in the decision making. When Sven Lidström recovered, he wrote a fairly critical note to Per Olof Hulth, who translated it for Jim. And Jim and his fellow managers also convened an ad hoc review committee for the drill, chaired by geologist Barclay Kamb, an associate of Hermann Engelhardt at Caltech. (Engelhardt had led the expedition in West Antarctica many years earlier on which Doug Lowder and Andy Westphal had made their unauthorized and unsuccessful attempt to run the very first feasibility study for AMANDA.)
One conclusion from these deliberations was that it was critically important to have experienced drillers on the Ice. There hadn’t been enough of them the first time around. Another conclusion was that there was too much “northern hemisphere” engineering: good ideas that had the side effect of making the drill too complicated. This systemic problem was exacerbated by NSF’s understandable but somewhat confused insistence on safety. The many safeguards that were suggested by the foundation’s consultants also made the drill more complicated, more susceptible to problems, and thus, ironically, more dangerous.
To retain drillers from one year to the next, they did everything they could to treat them well. They gave them year-round health benefits, so that even if they went to Greenland to drill during the Arctic summer they would still consider IceCube their home. (There’s an entire subculture of people who migrate seasonally between the top of the world and the bottom.) They helped the drillers find jobs in the off-season, they threw parties for them, they thanked them. Jeff Cherwinka points out that if you take care of the people, the people take care of the project, and that this attitude—which emanated, he felt, from Jim Yeck—helped build a team of committed people who wanted the project to succeed. (Jeff also observes that the people you work with at Pole become more than co-workers; you develop the sort of bonds that you would if you went on camping trips together. In February 2016, when the University of Wisconsin held a celebration to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the completion of IceCube, quite a few drillers showed up, and since this was Jeff’s gang, he threw a party for them at his home afterward.)