Spending the winter at the South Pole

Research

11/8/2021
Reading time 5 min.

Dr. Martin Wolf is spending an entire year at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The cosmic particle physicist has conducted research under Prof. Elisa Resconi at the Chair of Experimental Physics with Cosmic Particles and is now responsible for the IceCube Neutrino Detector at the South Pole. After arriving at the start of the Antarctic summer, he is now experiencing the dark and extremely cold winter. In this interview, he talks about spending the winter in the Antarctic and his life at the end of the world.

Astroparticle physicist Martin Wolf and his colleague lie on their backs in the snow in front of the IceCube telescope and look up at the sky, where the Milky Way can be seen clearly. — Moments like this make it worth spending a year at the South Pole, says astrophysicist Martin Wolf. Lying in the snow, he and his colleague gaze up at the Milky Way in the sky above the IceCube telescope. In the Antarctic winter, there is no sunlight for months – which makes the stars seem to shine even brighter.

Now it’s June and I’m spending my days in what is surely the most isolated and inhospitable place in the world: the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the Geographic South Pole. Since the sun went down in March and the Antarctic winter began, we’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. We won’t see an arriving aircraft or supply shipment until the end of October. Our contact with the outside world is limited to a few hours a day when satellites are passing over the South Pole, allowing us to exchange data.

Martin Wolf enjoys the antarctic sun. — End of the working day at the South Pole: Martin Wolf enjoying the sun before it disappears for several months.

My long way to the South Pole

38 people are spending the winter with me here: Scientists working on South Pole experiments, technicians, engineers and the kitchen and cleaning staff – the people responsible for maintaining operations and supplies at the station.

The nearest inhabited location, the US research station on the coast at McMurdo Sound, is around 1600 kilometers away via the South Pole Overland Traverse. In the summer, our supply shipments take 40 days to reach us on this ice highway. On November 24, 2020 I was flown in from the McMurdo Station with the other South Pole "winterovers" on a small propeller plane. It took about 10 passenger flights over the summer to replace the team here at the pole.

Although this is the second time I’m spending a year at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, many things were new on this journey – partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic: It took six weeks to get here, with stops in San Francisco, where I met up with the new winter team, and Christchurch, New Zealand. We had to quarantine again at each location. We also had a Covid routine at the South Pole: Every time a new group landed, the station went into “Phase Yellow”. This meant wearing masks and practicing social distancing. We’re glad that we were able to prevent the virus from reaching the pole.

Our work at the IceCube lab

My fellow physicist Josh Veitch-Michaelis and I take care of the operation of the IceCube detector. This huge telescope looks for the almost massless subatomic particles known as neutrinos. These high-energy astronomical messengers provide information to study the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.

Only two media can help us to see neutrinos: ice or water. Consequently, the IceCube telescope is embedded deep in the South Pole ice. The detector begins about 1500 meters below the ice surface and extends to a depth of 2500 meters. A cubic kilometer of ice is provided with 5160 photosensors capable of detecting tracks created by collisions between neutrinos and ice molecules.

My colleague Josh and I are responsible for keeping the detector running smoothly. An information system connects us to the IceCube lab about 800 meters from the station. An error message often means that we have to brave the cold and cross over to the lab. For the winter, the path is marked by flags so that we can find the way with headlamps even in the dark. Luckily the telescope is very stable so that problems don’t happen very often. We spend most of our time on routine maintenance tasks and scheduled updates.

In the background is a passenger plane in the snow, in the foreground a group of warmly dressed people saying goodbye. — Over the winter months, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is cut off from the outside world. At the end of February 2021, the final passenger flight of the season is ready for takeoff.

The Milky Way and auroras at the South Pole.

Along with the stars, from time to time the Antarctic night sky is lit up by auroras.

The IceCube laboratory in the distance against the sky colored orange by the sunset. — In March 2021 the sun gradually sets behind the IceCube lab. After it disappears below the horizon, the people in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station experience several months without daylight. During this time, flags in the snow help them find their way in the darkness.

Greenhouse from the inside. — The station has its own greenhouse to supply the isolated inhabitants with fresh greens and vegetables.

Impressions from our life at the South Pole

A winter without any sun light

Of course it’s always cold at the South Pole, but from mid-March it was obvious that the winter was approaching: The sun was getting lower every day and the temperature was dropping. Compared to minus 20°C in the summer, in the winter it can go as low as minus 70°C. On March 25, the big moment arrived: sunset! The weather and visibility were good, so we were able to watch the sun disappearing below the horizon and the sky above it turning green. This was followed by twilight, which lasted not hours, but weeks. The light gradually faded until the last rays vanished above the horizon. For months it will now be truly dark – and cold.

During this time, team building is very important to us. The community organizes movie screenings, game nights and lecture series. Emergency training is also scheduled. Holidays are very special occasions. On Christmas, our cook created a fantastic menu, including vegetables and greens from our greenhouse and 14 different desserts. To give our catering team a day off, the rest of us take regular turns in the kitchen on Sundays. A New Year’s tradition at the station is a little ceremony to position the new benchmark for the surveyed geographical South Pole. Because the ice moves about 10 meters towards the sea each year, the benchmark is repositioned at the correct location on New Year’s Day. In the first week of January, a marathon takes place. The course winds back and forth around the station and all of the sights at the South Pole. This year’s winner completed the route in four and a half hours. For an amateur this is a very respectable time if you bear in mind that we’re running through soft snow at an altitude of 3000 meters. The prize for the winner: extra time in the shower.

Although there is no sun for months during the Antarctic winter, we sometimes see light. We recently had a clear sky and the stars and auroras were so bright that Josh and I didn’t need our headlamps on the way to the IceCube lab. On the way back, we lay in the snow and looked up at the stars and the Milky Way – one of those very special moments that it’s worth coming here for!

The IceCube detector seen against the setting sun. — Every second, enormous numbers of high-energy neutrinos from deep space reach our Earth from all directions and pass through it almost without a trace. The cosmic particle physicist Prof. Elisa Resconi wants to understand which cosmic events accelerate these elementary particles to such enormous speeds. Because neutrinos have almost no interactions, gigantic detectors are needed like the IceCube, deep in the permanent Antarctic ice. About 300 scientists from 53 institutions and 12 countries are involved in the IceCube project, including the research group of Prof. Elisa Resconi at TUM. The main source of funding is the National Science Foundation in the USA, with further support provided by research funding agencies in the partner countries. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is responsible for the maintenance and operation of the detector.

Digital optical module being lowered into the ice. — The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole consists of 5160 optical sensors embedded in the Antarctic ice at depths of 1450 to 2450 meters. When the almost massless, subatomic neutrinos collide with ice molecules, the sensors detect trails of light. This reveals the energy and direction of the particles, which can be used to derive information on the most violent astrophysical phenomena: exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts and active galactic centers. Here we see such a sensor, a digital optical module (DOM), being lowered into the ice.

Prof. Elisa Resconi holds a so-called digital optical module. — Elisa Resconi has been involved in this project from the earliest planning stages nearly 20 years ago to the commissioning of IceCube in 2010 and the detection of the first cosmic neutrinos two years later. With her research group at TUM, in 2017 Elisa Resconi played a central role in identifying the first source of high-energy neutrinos, a blazar 5.7 billion light years away. Here she is seen holding one of the sensors, now buried in the Antarctic ice. Elisa Resconi has been a professor of Experimental Physics with Cosmic Particles at TUM since 2012 and has been the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center 1258 “Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro and Particle Physics” since 2017. From 2012 until 2018 the astrophysicist was a principle investigator of the Excellence Cluster Universe and since 2019 she has conducted research in the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS. In 2019, TUM appointed the cosmic particle physicist to a Liesel Beckmann professorship, which are awarded to top international women scientists.

Draft of the planned deep sea observatory. — From the pole deep into the ocean: Three years ago Elisa Resconi launched an international initiative for a new, multi-cubic-kilometer neutrino detector in the Pacific Ocean. One day it will be part of a worldwide network of neutrino telescopes. Resconi has succeeded in forming a partnership with Ocean Networks Canada, an initiative of the University of Victoria, Canada, which operates several deep sea observatories in the north-eastern Pacific, for which it has set up an extensive undersea fiber optic cable network. With the existing infrastructure, the wide undersea plain off the Canadian coast offers ideal conditions for the project. Exploratory experiments designed by Resconi’s team are already observing deep-sea conditions. The first module of the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Explorer (P-ONE) will be installed in 2023. The picture shows a draft of the planned neutrino observatory P-ONE in the Pacific Ocean (left). The telescope is to be modular and consist of seven identical detector segments (right).

Why do research at the South Pole? To detect messengers from space!

Further information and links

Martin Wolf' s blog ‚Life at the Pole‘.
The Collaborative Research Center 1258 is funded by the German Research Foun-dation (DFG).
The ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder - EXC-2094 – 390783311.

Technical University of Munich

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