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Mission to
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Dorothy Burke of San Rafael worked as an administrative assistant in McMurdo. "People here have a lot of depth," she said. "They’ve been places, done things; they think on a global scale, and that’s nice after living in a suburban world." This was her second season. Last year she came alone, and she loved it so much that she brought her husband, computer technician David Voorhees, when she returned this year. He too has fallen in love with the place. "Money doesn’t mean much here," he told me. "You’re part of a real small community. You might as well be in a mining town in the 1840s." And yet it’s a very difficult place to be for extended periods of time. Near the end of the season, people were obviously tired, ready to go home and see their loved ones–or just see something green. The last week I was in town, there was a big, rolling-around-on-the-ground fistfight over a card game, complicated by the fact that one of the cardplayers had insulted a woman. It really was just like a frontier town. These doses of humanity were a good thing for my mission on the ice. Each trip into the field took me further out on some esoteric limb, causing me to question my ability to inch back toward civilization. I was considering going feral, just like the folks in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica. That’s why I both worried about and relished my next mission, the South Pole, where people were studying nothing less than the origin of the universe. One researcher described his work to me, in advance via e-mail, as trying to look into the eye of God. So this not-so-secret Agent 007 hopped an LC-130 and set off to discover creation. Flying over the Beardmore, the mother of all glaciers, where scientist Ralph Harvey searches for meteorites and also where many of the great explorers climbed to the polar plateau, was thrilling. Between the heavily crevassed surface and the infamous Antarctic sastrugi, no wonder those fellows struggled. I spent most of the flight in the cockpit with the pilots, awestruck. Eventually, the plane landed at the South Pole, the load master opened the door, and I stepped out on the polar plateau. I expected to be met, but there was no one there. For a while I followed one of the four other passengers, but he knew where he was going and moved fast. Soon I was on my own. The South Pole is a huge construction site, since a new station, to be ready in 2004, is being built. The old station is a big silver dome nearly buried in snow. Amid all the construction, I spotted its silver top and made my way toward a big corrugated steel opening. I walked through several long tunnels lined with thick frost, like a freezer that needs defrosting. All kinds of equipment littered the tunnels, and various turnoffs to other underground passageways confused me. Somehow, I finally found myself under the dome. It was not anything like I had expected. What had I expected? Maybe a toasty enclosure of small buildings. Instead, the dome was dimly illuminated by the meager natural light coming down the long passageway, and its ceiling was thickly frosted, with big icicles hanging down. Beneath my feet was snow. By trial and error I found the galley, where there were no people but there was a hot table with leftovers. I helped myself to dinner and waited for the next thing to happen. Like in an airport, a broadcast system occasionally delivered messages to the entire station. While I was eating my dinner, something like the voice of God boomed, "Lucy Bledsoe report to the galley, Lucy Bledsoe report to the galley." I jumped up, then realized that I was in the galley, so sat back down again. Eventually, Alex Brown, the senior station manager, showed up for my in-brief, which consisted of handing me a booklet containing a map and rules, and telling me: "Just don’t get into trouble." Brown also told me I’d do much better with the altitude–9,450 feet but the physiological equivalent of 13,000 because of the lack of atmospheric pressure (meaning, no oxygen)–if I went right to bed. Finding my bed, located in a small building a couple hundred meters from the dome, was another adventure, but I was delighted when I did find it. Much like a berth on a ship, my space was private by means of a curtain, and I had a tiny but good bed, and (miraculously) a reading lamp. Berkeley has a history of extremity, and it’s no different on the southernmost continent. While there were just a few of us at McMurdo, Pole Station was swarming with Berkeleyans. Furthermore, the Berkeley scientists weren’t satisfied working on anything as standard as the biology of snow microbes or the composition of the immediate atmosphere. Oh no, this crowd was studying either some of the tiniest imaginable particles or the whole damn universe. I decided to start small, with neutrinos, and work my way up to the universe. Berkeley’s Michael Solarz, who was at the Pole as part of the AMANDA (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) project, had graciously offered to give me an insider’s tour. Solarz is a laboratory technician in UC’s physics department, where he describes his job working with graduate students and professors as going "from literally taking out the garbage in their rooms to very occasionally being a coauthor on the papers they put out." Solarz showed up to meet me in the small galley wearing a bright pink button-down shirt, fleece coveralls, and camouflage hat. If penguin researchers Nevins and Hester were the hardest-working scientists I met on the ice, Solarz was the most passionate. During the night before, he and his colleagues had lost one of their neutrino detectors down a bore hole where it had gotten stuck. Not only were they losing a piece of expensive equipment, they also were losing all their data from that source. Solarz had been up the entire night trying to retrieve the detector. But it didn’t seem to cool his fervent appreciation for the science fueling the project. "The universe is literally aglow in different types of radiation," he told me when I asked what neutrinos were. "There is photonic radiation, the most famous source of which is our sun. There are 200 billion galaxies and each galaxy has 200 billion stars, just approximately. So the universe is aglow in photonic light. The universe is also aglow in neutrinos, another form of radiation that was discovered in the 1950s. But our bodies are totally insensitive to neutrinos. They go right through us." Neutrinos are particles produced in the decay of radioactive elements and elementary particles, such as pions or protons. The weak interaction of neutrinos with matter make them ideal astronomical messengers. Unlike photons or charged particles, neutrinos can travel across the universe without hindrance, undeflected by interstellar magnetic fields and unabsorbed by intervening matter. But this same trait makes cosmic neutrinos fiendishly difficult to detect; gargantuan detectors are required for even a fighting chance at seeing them. Building such a detector would be prohibitively expensive, so the AMANDA project uses a naturally occurring one: the Antarctic ice cap. The AMANDA scientists use hot water to bore holes, two kilometers deep, into the ice cap. Then they lower neutrino detectors, which look a bit like huge Christmas-tree ornaments, into the holes for data-gathering. Berkeley engineers Jozsef Ludvig and Gerald Przybylski, who were also at Pole Station for the season, designed the data acquisition PC boards inside the forty spheres built for this season’s deployment. I accompanied Solarz out to the problematic bore hole in the Dark Sector, a kilometer from the Pole Station dome. "Dark" refers to quiet, as in no noise or radiation interference, because this is where scientists are doing cosmology and other sensitive probing of the universe. I helped Solarz and his colleagues reel in the two-kilometer cable from the now-useless bore hole, a difficult task. Two guys mounted a skidoo, grasped an end of the cable, then motored across the snow. Another crew, which I tried to help, guided the cable onto a massive spool. It was so cold that the two guys doing the speed work on the skidoo had to insert the spouts of cut-off plastic bottles in their mouths in order to breathe through their fleece face masks. Later that day, Solarz and I walked several kilometers away from the station so that I could experience the polar plateau in its pristine state. As South Pole Station shrank on the horizon, as the universe was reduced to just me, Solarz, snow, and sky, I learned new meanings for the words "silence" and "space." It was an amazing journey. The snow extended forever, but it was anything but flat. My view was so vast that I could see the curvature of the earth. In the foreground were the lovely patterns of sastrugi, wind-frozen waves in the ice. And all around lay an ecstatic silence.
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