ARIANNA - Antarctic Ross Ice-Shelf ANtenna Neutrino Array

Back at work

anelles — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 18:33:06 +0000

Back at work anelles Wed, 01/13/2016 - 11:33

As I have promised this blog will not die just because we are back in California. However, between you and new blog-posts is the upgrade of our website. Despite being very busy with analyzing our new data (no spoilers, but things are looking very nice), we also have to take care of our servers and software. It turns out that outdated operating systems attract spam -- you wouldn't believe it. So while I am working on a new and shiny website and our data analysis, I thought I will leave you with some photos to remind you how pretty Antarctica was.

It is so pretty that even the seals wave goodbye when you walk past them

Writing a new blog entry also gives me some time to learn and understand the new features of the website. After - thanks to Corey -- we have managed to port everything directly from version 6 to 8, it takes some time to get everything back into the same style. Now, I finally know why companies employ a whole IT department to keep the website running an up to date. It is more works than what it looks like, if you want interactivity -- yes, you will be able to register and post comments soon -- and a content management system that can in principle be used by everyone. And of course, nowadays we are supposed to have up-to-date scientific material for the interested public, preferably interactive and with fancy features. I should really stop explaining this to all of you and get back to work!

Take a look at the pressure ridges that are formed when the sea-ice pushed into the permanent ice from the glaciers. Impressive hiking through them!

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ARIANNA: Neutrinos at the Highest Energies

arianna — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 23:00:15 +0000

ARIANNA: Neutrinos at the Highest Energies arianna Tue, 01/12/2016 - 16:00

No, we did not get lost!

anelles — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 19:49:54 +0000

No, we did not get lost! anelles Thu, 12/24/2015 - 12:49

The deployment team 2015/2016 is safely back in California and ready to enjoy the Christmas holidays. While -- as true scientists -- we are all eager to look at the data and how the stations are performing, there has to be time to relax and enjoy the warmth. Well, actually Southern California seems to be broken, I am wearing a sweater right now ...

I had been almost ready to write another blog in McMurdo, but the inertia of recovery had taken a hold of me and it never made it online, so here are some last thoughts from McMurdo:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

You think you are done ... but you are actually not quite there yet. When back in McMurdo, you basically need to go through the whole trouble again, only backwards. Take all your stuff from the helopad to your storage area. Pack it up, separated by things that go on the vessel and things that go on the plane and then distribute it to science cargo. And don't forget the numerous pages of paperwork that need to be filled in, before something gets to leave the continent.

Also, gear return. Everything from sleeping bags, to tents, shovels, fire extinguishers, dish towels and forks, is inventoried and put back on the shelves. Of course, after everything has been cleaned and bleached. A nice and mind-numbing task after all that excitement from the field. The same goes for our dearly beloved pee-bottles. They get emptied, cleaned and bleached. Apparently, the most feared moment by all scientists. I don't really understand why. After all, you had this bottle in your sleeping bag for three weeks and you even get to wear gloves while cleaning it. Maybe I have cleaned up after too many student parties to be worried about this.

This year, we have been amazingly efficient with everything back in McMurdo. Even the fact that we have to put our large tent back up in order for it to dry went rather smoothly. If one takes into account that the least qualified people are doing this task -- namely those people that never got to set up one of the large tents before, we.

After indulging in McMurdo cuisine for a couple of days, also you portion size goes back to normal. It turns out that you do not need 5000 calories anymore, when you are sleeping in a warm bed and only do mild physical exercise every day. So now for the last couple of days, it is time to enjoy the McMurdo social live. Go to day bar (the bar for the night shift, happening from 7 am to 11 am), visit Scott Base (the neighbouring New Zealand station), take a tour of whatever is currently on offer, go to open mic night, go to the Coffee House to have some wine, go the annual masquerade ball, which requires you to also go to the craft room to make a mask for yourself, go to a movie night or watch a movie in the common room with whoever is around, go the gym, go to the sauna (I have done it, walking outside in Antarctica in my bikini!), practice for the 10k run happening next week, go for a hike, rent a bike, there is so much to do, when you don't have to work.

Unfortunately, we do not exclusively get to spent the time slacking off. We check daily whether our stations are still doing good -- which they are -- and whether there are some last minute tests that we can do from over here. I have to admit, things are going slower than they were before we left, but after a successful season a little down-time might be allowed.

And then we flew home:

That much about my last thoughts from McMurdo. This blog will not die once we get home. Entries might just be a little less frequent. But I will do my very best to announce any news on social media. And especially an updated website on which the comments function might actually work is foreseen in the near future.

Happy holidays and a successful 2016 to all of you from the ARIANNA team! May some neutrinos be with us ;)

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Field pull-out: successful!

anelles — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 04:30:52 +0000

Field pull-out: successful! anelles Mon, 12/07/2015 - 21:30

We are back in McMurdo! And clearly everyone is happy to be back! We were even greeted with fluffy snow.

Two friendly science supporters (Thanks Breezy and Sarah!) came out to help us. Of course, as anticipated, scientists are never ready when they are supposed to. Things look strange, some small last minutes mishaps -- turns out an Ice Auger (small ice drill) and thin cables do no go well together -- and low priority items that one still really wants to finish, meant that hectic set in. This combined with the incredible amount of snow accumulation called for a long day and a short night.

Still, there was time to enjoy the exceptionally good weather conditions with a picnic outside! You would not believe it, it was above freezing and we all felt like summertime. Scientific wisdom of the day: folding chairs with metal feet are not very stable on fresh Antarctica snow, as Chris is demonstrating -- for your convenience -- when Corey was just about to take a group picture.

The group picture? In fact, we are all still sorting fotos and getting organized back here in McMurdo. So, there will be some future blogs coming up, in which I anticipate beautiful pictures from the helicopter and panoramas from the field. So stay tuned until we are rested and settled back in.

But we of course cannot let you go yet, without having a look at how our cargo got home:

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Routine

anelles — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 02:51:33 +0000

Routine anelles Thu, 12/03/2015 - 19:51

It is quiet unbelievable, but even in remote places as Antarctica you develop such as thing as a routine.

Getting dressed in your many layers in a tent is no longer a problem, you know where everything is in your pile of clothes and stuff and you are out of your tent faster than ever. We meet in the kitchen tent for breakfast, someone is on kitchen duty and has set up food and is probably busy melting snow for drinking water. On your way to the kitchen tent you dutifully empty your Pee bottle into the big barrel that is by now almost full and contains amazing 50 gallons or 190 liters of pee and dish washing water. After breakfast we go out make measurements, or stay in and make measurements and pass the time with science until lunch. After lunch we make more measurements and then it is time for dinner, after which another round of measurements follow. Most of the time is spent setting up and cabling equipment, closely followed by waiting for the electronics to do their job and record the measurement.

Thank goodness, the support crew from the BFC (McMurdo acronym for those guys) are coming out to help us break down camp, otherwise, we would start feeling to comfortable in our routine. It probably also helps that the weather has been nice in the past couple of days, so we did not have to do any snow shoveling and being outside for the measurements are quite agreeable. However, even is this nice weather, standing around on the snow waiting for a measurement cycle to complete, gives you cold feet -- or in my case, it is either cold feet or cold hands. It seems that my body has decided that there is only enough blood to keep one of the two warm and the other one can suffer. Still, no frostbites to account for so far and the hand/toe warmers have not been used extensively. Somehow, most of them also do not work, so it is more like a lottery anyway.

Another interesting side-note that occurred to me this morning was the whole story about peeing when you are cold. I have never had the experience quite like here. In your warm sleeping tent, you sleep for 8 hours without a problem. You get out of the tent, into the cold, and immediately your bladder is screaming: "Empty me". Even if it is totally not worth the effort. Biologically a well-known fact. Your body wants to get rid of fluids so that it has less to warm up. So maybe, it is all connected. To pull out some stereotypes: Men always complain that women are cold and have to go the bathroom all the time. It is also a well-known fact that men have on average a higher muscle to fat ratio than women and muscles generate heat. Thus, men are warmer, need thinner sleeping bags and less clothes. So maybe, all the husbands and boyfriends that constantly complain about their partners, just have not been doing their job right. Keep the ladies warm and then it will save you stopping the car on a road trip every hour. I will add this to "wisdom from Antarctica", you never know, when this could come in handy again.

After a lot of excitement about the first Skua, we even saw another one yesterday. Clearly smaller and lighter in color. So, could it have been a different type of skua or a male instead of a female? Some background research on the internet told me that I had hit a blank spot there. There seems to be a large discussion among biologists, in how many species and subspecies one has to distribute skuas and to make matters more difficult they all seem to mix with each other. Thus, I just stick with the fact the the last skua was of a lighter brown and skinnier. I have not taken such a dislike towards skuas yet that I only resort to name calling at the sight of one of them as it is the case for one my colleagues -- I won't be naming names here, of course.

All this going out to stations in the snow, is certainly working in favor of my leg muscles. Once out of here, I will be so fit for hiking as I have not been in years. Sadly though that the last thing I want to do when getting back to McMurdo is hiking in the snow. Right now, all sorts of hiking in fact sounds not attractive at all, but probably a couple of nice nights in a comfortable bed and excessive showering will convince me. For the time being, we have science to distract us from missing these essential things.

The exciting part about radio science is that everything you do out here disturbs your measurements. For example, you cannot take a clean measurement when you are talking on the VHF radio to each other. In the nice weather and for outside measurements, we have therefore resorted to walking signals. You can easily see someone from a distance of 1 km walking out of a tent. So you can agree on radio silence for a certain time period until you see someone walk. It turns out, 12 minutes of radio silence until you see someone walking turn 12 minutes into a very long time.

If we are all in the tent, we just have to turn everything completely off. This means, no internet, no computers, no phones, no satellite-phones, no charging of batteries on the solar panels, no electric lighters, no music players, no cameras, no shaking on plugs and connectors, no unshielded cables on metal tables, and ... I think you get the idea. Mostly, the only thing you can do is sit on your behind and watch someone crawl into the RF quiet tent to fix cables.

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The 13th entry

anelles — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 01:35:27 +0000

The 13th entry anelles Tue, 12/01/2015 - 18:35

After more than 13 days in the field, some sort of general tiredness has set in. The weather has been worse in this season than what it usually is like (some people claim a connection with El Nino), we have been getting more blowing snow, more hard wind and fewer sunny days. It has been like "groundhog day" (German: "Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier" = "Every day the groundhog says hello", which I find more fitting to our situation, when groundhog = snow), you climb out of your tent and you see that more snow has accumulated. Then it is digging before breakfast. Also, we are tired of digging, tired of walking kilometers in the snow to the stations and tired of not being able to shower, sleep in a warm and comfy bed and eat things that have not been dehydrated, canned or frozen.

And then, then there was station 13. For some reason station 13 was convinced that it was too hot to accept charge from the solar panel. Yes, I understand, I have been complaining about the heat wave, but there was seriously no need for a station to adapt that policy. Thus, we had to check it out, which meant digging up all the accumulated snow around it and pulling it out of its hole. To make matters more fun, it was one of the deep stations. After we had it back in the tent and convinced it that it was not blazing hot, it was working fine again. So, back in the hole. Once back in the hole, it did not feel like connecting via wireless. Out again. Back in the tent it shows that there is nothing wrong with it and it happily connected again. So, back into the hole and everything worked fine again. Finally after having walked for 6 kilometers in total, dug a three meter hole, we were back to the regular state. Apparently, it just had a hick-up. Or it wanted to annoy us -- what do you expect, if you call a station 13 ... (culturally side information: the number 13 is considered unlucky in several western countries, like Germany and the US)

But in any case, we can do ice studies now. And since requires two people to set something up and then to wait for 12 minutes until something needs to be changed, this clearly calls for some free time activities. Ever played Frisbee at 78 degrees South?

What else happened in the past days? Since Sundays are off in McMurdo, and NSF wants to grant us all our time in the field, we will only fly out on Monday. In order to help us break down camp, two helping hands will come in on Friday. We hope that our camp break-down it will be easier than the one of our friends from C-525. Apparently, they pulled-out in crazy conditions with wind and snow that made their huge tent break. We still have to call them, now that they are back in McMurdo about how things went in detail. But we clearly hope for a better pull-out.

And we are hoping for something less monochromatic after we leave. No matter how pretty Antarctica can be, it is always white with maybe a small hint of blue. And the little red dots of the parkas just don't compensate for the missing green, brown, orange and yellow that your eye is so used to. Thankfully, the snow goggles are tinted yellow for our convenience.

Talking about convenience. So far, during this trip we have several ideas about how to make money out of this program, which would conveniently open up new funding possibilities. For example, one could open a diet camp, in which you can eat ridiculous amounts of food and still loose weight. Out here, in the cold, lots of calories are needed just to keep your body warm. Also, you don't really need to do sports. Just walking in the deep snow from left to right, let's say from the sleeping tent to the science tent burns more calories than a 1k run at home. And shoveling your tent free of snow every night adds to the weight loss balance. A problem with motivation? Well, you could also not dig out your tent, but then you cannot get in anymore and then you die at night. This is a motivation that no fitness coach could ever provide. And another idea: How about a camp for future managers? Being out here, certainly improves your ability to work in a team -- if you are on your own, you do not get very far. I helps you to work on your frustration tolerance, resilience and self-motivation. It also would be amazingly attractive: a company that sends their leaders on management camp in Antarctica. Anyway, that was just on a side note, should the National Science Foundation ever run out of money ... commercializing research seems to be a thing nowadays.

And then, we shall not forget about our wildlife encounter at camp. A skua! It flew by and visited Chris and me at station 17 while doing ice studies. Since we did not have any food, it left us straight away again and headed for camp, which gave us just enough time to radio Corey to get his camera out. Apparently, we were 4 seconds too late, but evidence can be found ...

* For all of you, who did not get the first picture. It says "I heart nu". Clearly, the "heart" is the modern short version of love and the Greek letter "nu" is the commonly used signed for neutrino. So, quite clearly: "we love neutrinos".

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No more holes!

anelles — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 21:28:57 +0000

No more holes! anelles Sat, 11/28/2015 - 14:28

Well, it is true. We have accomplished the minimum goal for this year. We have visited all stations, gave them a check-up and put them back in their holes. If everything goes as planned, they can now stay there and happily take data until their solar panels are buried in the snow and they will run out of power, which is not expected to happen soon. We would have not hoped to be this far by now already, but we have been powering through bad weather and have not been stopped by aching arms, legs and backs. This is why you don't have to pay scientists a lot, by the way. We just love what we do and do all of this without surcharges for dangerous environments, weekend works or night-time work.

In any case, we have therefore now reached the extras. We want to study our ice and the radio environment. We started with the radio environment yesterday and that was already fun. As we know, the largest source of radio interference are humans. And who are the only humans currently in the vicinity of our experiment? We are. So, we started by turning of the generator. Generators are the most annoying radio noise source, for example whenever a helicopter lands our stations go crazy. But we of course wanted to look at the radio environment with our oscilloscope, which need power. So, we ran of a battery and used an inverter that gives you 110 V. It turns out that even buying the most radio quiet inverter also creates noise. So, we stuck all equipment in a little radio quite tent (a Faraday cage with conductive tent liner) from our colleagues from Taiwan and moved the antenna to more than 30 meters from our tent. Then a long endeavor of changing filters, attenuators and cables followed, which left us with the conclusion that our new antenna is just so sensitive, that it picks up on every little interference, we are making. Apart from the noise that we are creating there seems to be nothing going on out here, as expected. But it would be so much nicer, if we could prove this with a solid measurement.

No giving up yet, today is another day and we will be getting there. Even, if we have to wrap everything in tin foil! Just kidding of course, we would never create so much waste out here. After all, all our waste has to be shipped all the way back to California. It turns out that New Zealand does not want the waste of the US antarctic program -- so literally every single piece is put on the boat back to California. Even the buckets from our bathroom tent, if I am not totally mistaken. Avoiding trash gets a totally new importance here and I have never been in a place in the US before, where so much consideration is put into recycling. The people from waste management at McMurdo (the "wasties") are doing a terrific job.

In this aspect, we id a great job on Thanksgiving dinner, because there weren't really any remains. We finished everything that we made. And for the first time in quite a while, we were so full, than no one could fit an additional chocolate bar after dinner.

Dinner

While the Thanksgiving Dinner has been a classic -- steak, vegetables and roasted potatoes -- not all our meals are classic. We take turns in cooking and whoever is not on cooking duty can make random suggestions, usually greeted with a long sigh and a shaking head. However, Chris is known to take on the challenge. So, Corey asked for Lasagne. Only challenge, we have no lasagne pasta, no tomatoes (in fact, we have no fresh vegetables) and only a very small oven. So, Chris took dehydrated pasta "Leonarda do Fettucini", Hamburger patties, pasta sauce, a pan and cheese and magically made something like a lasagne. We can fix everything it seems. The next challenge was the no-bake cheesecake. One would think, that if you bought one of these packs, you really did not want to add anything yourself. However, this package requires adding of sugar and butter. (I can see butter since fat might go bad, but sugar, seriously?? Has sugar been getting so expensive that high fructose corn syrup is the only thing that one could afford??) Our problem: We have loads of butter, but we did not bring any sugar. Since we could not let Thanksgiving go by without cake, we substituted the sugar with a mixture of honey and cinnamon crunch breakfast cereal. Also that turned out great. The fact that we had to use our frying pan as cake form can only be considered as an aesthetic problem.

Desert -- no bake cheesecake with cranberry sauce and Cinnamon Crunch decoration

So, what will be on the agenda for today? After we called MacOps to tell them that we were alive and thanked them for their Thanksgiving card

Thank you, MacOps!

we are ready to go! -- If we hadn't we would be certainly ready in an hour, when the rescue helicopter was flying overhead. If you don't make the check-in time every day, they will assume that something happened that made you not be able to call in, and they will start the rescue operation. So, if you would want to avoid being disturbed by a helicopter with pretty angry people during late breakfast, you better make sure that you call in on time. Which we did. Consequently, we start our days work -- by digging more holes! Wait, did the title not say that we have done enough digging? Well, for the ice studies we will have to dig more holes. Clearly the title of this blog has been a little premature.

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Objective and subjective temperatures

anelles — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 21:27:22 +0000

Objective and subjective temperatures anelles Thu, 11/26/2015 - 14:27

Something must be wrong with me. Admittedly, it has been warmer in the past couple of days, but on an objective scale, -5 degrees C is not really warm. Nonetheless, I feel like I am sleeping in a sauna. My tent has ice at the bottom on the sides, so I am not sure that it is significantly above zero. Still, I am sweating in my double lined sleeping bag and feel totally comfortable wearing only a t-shirt and underwear while brushing my teeth in the morning. I even have the feeling that my feet feel better, when the socks are off.

Yesterday, during lunchtime, we had the "hot tent" incident. Chris was using the gas oven to make pizza bagels (yes, we are very creative down here), when Corey and I came back from the field. The thermometer had the tent temperature at 16 degrees. We collectively decided that this was way too hot and that we had to open the door of the tent. In the meantime, Southern California has been some colder days with about 15 degrees C and I have been hearing that people were really cold. Especially the hard winds made it almost unbearable. You all really have my sympathies.

Also, the last couple of days were clearly "little red" days. In addition to the huge red jacket, we have been issued, which is almost as cozy as my sleeping bag, we received thinner red jackets. So in addition to "big red", we have "little red" for warmer weather. So, it must be blazing hot. This coincides with the fact that I am only wearing one pair of long underwear. Who needs two and a fleece layer in these conditions? Thankfully, the weather report has us due for worse weather soon. Then finally this heat wave will be over.

As everyone from the United States might have noticed it is Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, we are not having turkey in the tent. In fact, not even poultry, after what we refer to as "the poultry incident", which has everything to do with us trusting the food list and hallucinating more chicken than what we had in our cooling boxes. In any case, we are also facing the challenge that we need to have two dinners. I have been told that due to the date switch, we need to have Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving New Zealand time and Thanksgiving US time. So on early Thanksgiving, we had:

* Meatballs with gravy
* Mashed potatoes
* Green beans

Great success!

On late Thanksgiving, it will be:

* Steak
* Red potatoes
* Carrots and green beans
And a dessert of:
* No-bake cheesecake with cranberry sauce

As you see, we are not eating terrible, however, a little more comfort while eating and a different decoration than a tent would have certainly made a difference. Still, we are not complaining. We even shared the joys of our colleagues from C-525, who are celebrating on the other side of the Ross Ice-shelf with a Cornish Hen. They know what luxury is!

On a different note, thanks to all of you for suggesting topics or asking questions. I am happy to include new topics as they come in. To everyone, who does not have my personal email, I am sorry but the commenting function on the blog will not work in the foreseeable future. (It is just not a good idea to try to update the webserver on a flaky internet connection from Antarctica, when you actually also need the website for your science.)
So, if you have comments, please just google or facebook me (Anna Nelles) and I will do my best to answer any questions received by mail on the blog.

Here we go, let's pour some more information in this blog.

Why do we insist on going to bed at "night", while the sun is up all the time, which totally sounds like we should take shifts? In fact, McMurdo has a night shift, so at breakfast, there will always be a buffet for dinner for the people on night rotation. This is known as "midrats" in McMurdo slang. This is totally not helpful for new people, who are likely to go for the faux-pas and eat food that is not intended for them. Thankfully, I did not feel like having dirty rice for breakfast, so I was save.
Also, night shifts at McMurdo are not that bad, since there is only a tiny fraction of the year, in which you actually get "real" day and night, I mean with sunrises and sunsets. For the rest, technically everyone is on nightshift or dayshift, only that McMurdo is in New Zealand time and sticks to it, with breakfast from 4:30 to 7:30, lunch from 12:00 to 13:30 and dinner from 17:30-19:30, if I remember correctly. And then offset accordingly, breakfast and dinner for the nightshift, with an additional lunch at 0:00.
If this all works in McMurdo, why do we not keep up the shift rotation in the field? Well, we are three people and you need to have two of us working at the same time to be productive and one person is on cooking duty. Clearly, the math does not work out for shifts for us. Unless we start doing a 28 hour day or something. We do, however, have to check-in with MacOps every morning before 10, so that would totally ruin the system. Clearly, shifts are for bigger teams. So, if anyone has some spare money ...

So what about penguins? Yes, I understand that everyone wants the cute Adelie penguin on the picture with the science guys with the big red jackets. We want that picture, too! However, penguins kind of need the water. And from our current position the water is about 500 meters away. Downwards! Since ice drilling penguins still have to be discovered, we will be alone for a while. There is a faint chance in McMurdo, but if I was a penguin, I would stay clear of this area. Too many people and too many cars!
The only wildlife that has ever been spotted near camp are Skuas. These birds are famous in McMurdo for stealing everything that seems edible. So, food should never be taken in a visible manner out of the kitchen or Skuas will dive at it. When we left, the Skuas had not returned to McMurdo, but I have been reassured that they will be there once we are back. Thus, for the time being I won't be able to post photos of seals or penguins of any kind. Maybe we get lucky in McMurdo, but no guarantees.

I guess now, I will have to go back to science. However, just to be clear, it is not that no science is being done, while I am typing. All stations are running while we are down here. Via the wireless link to the mountain (the one that also provides me with internet), the stations send their data to UCI in California. And should the link be unavailable, they also have their own satellite link that allows for data transfer. So, in principle the stations could just keep running without us until the solarpanels are buried in the snow. With a snow accumulation of a maximum of a meter each year, a four meter tower gives you probably five years of uninterrupted running. This is clearly the plan for future operations. But we are not quite there yet. So, no worries, we won't be digging up equipment for the rest of our lives.

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Science is glamorous!

anelles — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 22:32:44 +0000

Science is glamorous! anelles Tue, 11/24/2015 - 15:32

We get to travel the world, go all the way to Antarctica and make amazing discoveries. Or something like that is at least what a lot of people expect from our work.

Sorry, to disappoint but currently, science might not be so glamorous at all times.

Three people, three colleague graduates, two with a PhD and what are we doing most of the day? We dig! We dig up our equipment. We make our changes to it, put it back into the hole and dig snow on top of it. Next week, probably, we will even dig some of them back up to do studies of the reflectivity of the border between ice and water. Wait, before I complain more about the digging -- reflectivity? What are we studying? ARIANNA's design relies on the fact that the boundary between ice (from the ice shelf) and water (seawater from the ocean) is intransparent for radio emission. A neutrino that interacts in the ice will create radio emission. However, the neutrino is down-going which would bring all of the emission to the bottom of the ocean, if is wasn't for the boundary layer. The transition from ice to water acts like a mirror for radio emission. (Hard to imagine? You sometimes can't see the bottom of the swimming pool, if you look at a wrong angle, so the boundary layer between water and air becomes intransparent for light.) So, the radio emission bounces off the boundary layer between ice and water and comes back up into our antennas. So far, the design. The interesting part is now to check how perfect the reflection is. The more perfect the better, of course, but also with not 100% perfect reflection we can find our neutrinos. We only need to know about the properties, so that we can correct our analysis. Some measurements have been done in the past, but since they are time consuming (DIGGING!!) there are more to be done. But things are looking good! For future purposes, we will, of course, not dig up every single station -- that would be far too many for an array of 1000 stations. Projects like the ones from our ROSETTA colleagues (see one of my earlier blogs about using an airplane to measure the Ross ice-shelf) will certainly do the trick.

Apart from digging, what other glamorous activities keep us busy all day. One very important task is sweeping the floor. To cite Corey: "Water is so much easier to sweep up, if it is frozen." Since our tent reaches cozy temperatures of 10 degrees C, snow and ice have the tendency to melt. And, if everything outside of your tent is covered in snow (well, Antarctica, it was to be expected) there is almost no avoiding of carrying it in. Furthermore, water vapor will condensate on the walls on the tent, run down and freeze back up at the bottom of the tent. So every morning, someone has to glamorously get down on his/her knees and do the sweeping round.

You wonder about the clutter in our tent. Well, one single tent has to fit our kitchen (in the back) and two tables to "do science on". Do science on? Well, every change that we want to make to the stations, like exchanging the batteries, needs to be done after all. And this is not like changing the batteries of your digital camera, click out, click in. It involves Chris soldering on little lugs to the batteries that we ordered and assembling them into the station box. A little bit like Tetris for experts. To make matters more interesting, all the fancy soldering irons do not work in Antarctica. Too dry, too cold, too unstable power, who knows. Only the really basic ones work. So, lesson learned here, go for the bargain bin soldering iron, they don't get stopped by anything. However, the work gets very gritty, if your soldering iron is very ... Hey, welcome to glamorous science!

On a general note, it is quite interesting, how modern day science works. The collaborations get bigger and bigger. For example, thousands of people work at the experiments at the colliders in CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, but the fame for discovering the Higgs boson went mostly to the two spokespersons of the detectors at that time. All engineers, graduate students, post-docs and scientists, who puzzled the detectors together and spent countless hours measuring little components are on the author list of the articles in the end, but the fame never really trickles down. This is usually not the fault of the spokespersons, they know that they could not have done the experiment on their own. But politics and the media, find it so much easier to have one person and one face to represent a scientific discovery.

But, let's not get too philosophical for the moment, we should return to more basic topics. Like the bathroom issue. Despite my promise that I would not go into too much detail, I got specific questions: I am sorry, but the instruction video on how to use the funnel and how to work the bathroom tent, is not happening. We have decided to go for a PG 13 rating of this blog, so no, not happening. I can, however, share the beautiful view out of our bathroom tent with you.

In the background you see Minna Bluff, which is between us and McMurdo. It is nicely covered in snow after all the enjoyable snowstorms from the past days. You might also notice the flag upside down. Since our whole camp is flagged everywhere, this is our personal sign for occupied. Why do we have flags? Not because we so glamorously wanted to mark down our territory. It is just to make sure that you are able to find your things again after a snowstorm. Note, there are boxes between all these flags ...

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The sun is back!

anelles — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 08:27:32 +0000

The sun is back! anelles Mon, 11/23/2015 - 01:27

And my arms are sore. The minute the weather improved, we were out digging. Station 15 is now upgraded and back in the field and the same goes for 18. And 18 is special! Why is 18 special? It has been longer out here than the other stations, and since snow accumulates to about one meter a year, digging that station up was a major excavation mission. We had to excavate so much that we started to hope to find dinosaurs, but that did not work out, unfortunately.

(To everyone, who thinks that we have gone totally insane suggesting dinosaurs: in fact, people have found lots of fossils and dinosaur remains in Antarctica, so there has been a time where Antarctica was not cold but habitable and green. That is unfortunately most of what I remember from the exhibition in the science lab in McMurdo. I admit, I was most impressed by the huge fossilized tree trunk that is on display and forgot to actually read the captions. So, if you ever come to McMurdo, I recommend that exhibition. And please afterwards tell me, how this hole story with the dinosaurs went.)

But back to the problem. So we heroically excavated a huge amount of snow to find a station at the bottom of the hole. Thankfully, someone had taken a picture a couple of years before, so we knew where to dig. Thankfully, no one has taken a picture of station 10, which we will have to do tomorrow. That will be great. I will let you know!

What else has improved with the weather? Well, from my perspective, getting rid of fluid has gotten less annoying. Peeing in a bottle with a little funnel is fun enough, if you are not wearing anything. But try it when being dressed up as like Michelin person with four layers and every single bit of exposed skin will be extremely cold within a couple of seconds. No wind and sun, lets you already reduce the problem to three layers and you can afford a couple of seconds of bare skin without immediately deciding to never have to pee again while you are here. I have also now learned about the wonders of ECW (extremely cold weather gear) pants. You can take the behind of without taking off your suspenders, so your front is still warm while you can safely use the bathroom tent. "Bathroom tent" makes it sound extremely fancy, but actually it is just a tent in the most classical sense (one pole in the middle) with no floor and a box with a bucket in it. Mind you, this is only for solid remains as otherwise the buckets will become too heavy and full too soon. So using the bathroom turns into a sequential procedure. First the bottle then the bucket. The bottle then goes in a big barrel ("grey water barrel" as also our dish washing water goes there) while the bucket stays to be used until it gets changed by the end of the week. You never wanted to know that? Well, me neither but that is how this goes. Another fun fact is that all pee bottles are old drinking bottles and most of them have a scale on the side, which was probably once intended to measure you fluid intake. Well, you can now also measure fluid "outtake". And I have learned that my bladder can hold more than a liter. But let's not go further into detail here.

Another aspect of the nicer weather is that sleeping in the tents now really has the camping experience. Even though, the sun never sets, it gets very low at night, meaning that it is a little colder. So, when you wake up in the morning, your tent has turned into a sauna. Well, there is still some iced over condensation so it might not be a real sauna, but when you are in a double lined sleeping bag, equipped to be good to something like -25 degrees, 0 degrees in your tent are incredibly hot. So, how everyone knows from camping at home, the temperatures drive you out of the tent. And when you can climb out without being hit by a snow storm the mornings are looking less grim. Of course, we also do not have to defrost the generators every day and dig out our tents every night. But that is almost not even worth mentioning.

So, to close up the whole story for today, we will leave you with some nice imagery that we took on the helo flight in. You should also get to appreciate the Antarctic beauty, like we are doing now. While cooling our arms and sore hands with ... ice, right! And in case you were wondering, we do not have an ice cube machine like they do in McMurdo. We just pick it up from the ground!

Take a good look. You can spot the traverse (huge tractors driving) to South Pole!

One of the ARIANNA stations waiting for us!

And the helicopter is setting down. As you can see, our site is very flat and featureless. Best conditions for a well-defined neutrino array.