Why are any of us here?

It's a pertinent question and one that comes up often. The meaning of life is not one that escapes us here either, but more directly I'm talking about "Why are we at the South Pole?" The easy answer is science. The other answer deals with politics, governments, and world domination, which bring on heated debate and that would just ruin an otherwise perfectly interseting post.

Obviously someone has to hold up the world!

Pushing the boundaries of what we think we know and what we think we could know. Looking back in time, studying dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos, looking for new systems of stars, particles, planets, trying to determine what happened at .00000000001 seconds after the big bang, current weather phenomena, water systems under the largest ice sheet in the world, world-wide seismic research, air sampling, space particulate weather, and surely a large variety of other projects I am neglecting. All of these projects are here for one or a variety of reasons that make pole an ideal research station. The dry, cold air, the altitude, the two miles of ice, the affects Earth's rotation has on the polar regions, etc...

So somehow I've left out a lot of science from this blog. I've been enjoying it all along, so here's a quick bit of 3 projects I have witnessed...

SPT - South Pole Telescope

I haven't managed to get a tour of this place yet, but I think I'll be finding one soon. They are currently getting up and running for the winter season of observation. They are looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB, which is left over radiation from the big bang. This isn't being observed directly, but rather is used as a baseline to find other objects in the cosmos. The CMB is extremely consistent, so where there is a hole or a modification of the microwaves, galaxies, stars, and other masses of particles are present. This is helping to bring information from the far reaches of the cosmos to "light". The CMB does not speak to distance, but mass and exsistence, so other forms of observing are used in concert, optical, or cosmic rays...

This giant 10 meter dish is used to focus the information. It is a perfect parabola to within microns. LOTS of adjustments keep it this way. To capture the information a series of cones further focus the radiation onto tiny little spider-web looking sensors that are maintained at a ridiculously cold temperature of .15 Kelvin (or near there) by the evaporative cooling of helium. As these webs are bombarded with radiation they heat up slightly, and the energy used to maintain the cold temperature of the web is measured. This differnce in energy is the reading. Pretty wild eh?

Pieces of BICEP - decommissioned this year in waiting for BICEP 2!

BICEP 1 which is housed in the same structure also uses the CMB, but for a different purpose. They are looking back in time to the "event horizon" or back into the beginnings of the universe. Got it? This is kind of difficult to explain, and I'm not sure I'm the one to do it. But, they use very similar equipment to detect the CMB, and it is possible to look back in time because of the sheer size of the universe. If you think of it in the way that the light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach the earth, then we only ever see the sun where it was 8 minutes previously. So consider the universe. Much bigger, and expanding at a speed greater than the speed of light now. (It's been speeding up). So as things get further away, it takes longer and longer for their light, or in this case particles to reach us here on earth. So, we can see further back in time at any moment than the moment preceding. At some point in the universe the light, or particles will never catch up with earth. This is the event horizon, that we cannot see beyond. Wow... a purely me post next!

Lastly for today, the largest project going here right now called ICE CUBE. Heard of neutrinos? These are very high energy, very small particles that are everywhere and pass through nearly everything. They are passing through you right now, and the entire earth, and for the most part anything else in their way. Every now and then they hit a water molecule, which is key, that then produces something called a muon, which when passing through the antarctic ice makes a visual wake not unlike the wake created by an airplane traveling beyond the speed of sound. ICE CUBE is a project that is convinced they can use these muons to map the cosmos according to neutrinos. Their detector takes up 1 square K in the ice, about a kilometer and a half down. As they are still under construction, they have yet to make too many observations just yet, but they can tell us there is a moon! It is quite the experimental project down here. They directly employ nearly 1/5 of the personnel on base.

The construction phase is fairly exciting right now. These are some pics from Drill Camp. (They are drilling two mile deep holes with hot water drills, and then deploying DOMs - Data Optical Modules which detect muons - 60 per hole, 5000 thousand total) They then take this data and send it through...

a couple of wires... (the ones on the left are about the size of my arm, on the right numbering in the thousands)

which feed...

one or two (dozen racks of) computers!

That's the science tour for the day! Hope I've caught you all up, and as a disclaimer, I'm going purely off of memory, no notes or reference, so NSF is likely the best place to find more information for the science-hungry reader!