The trip from Delaware to Antarctica is a grueling journey that begins with a six-hour flight to California and includes a day huddling in the noisy belly of a C-130 cargo plane. Along the way, scientists with the Bartol Research Institute at UD make a pit stop in Christchurch, New Zealand.
As palm trees sway and the temperature climbs, Bartol researchers like Glenn Spiczak and Tim Miller pull on heavy boots and coats thick enough to protect them from Antarctica’s sub-freezing weather. Then, they wait in New Zealand’s mildly tropical climate to learn whether their plane can make the nine-hour flight.
"You might wait four hours to find out weather conditions in Antarctica aren’t hospitable, so you have to be there again the next morning," recalls Spiczak. Sudden weather changes can prompt an abrupt return to Christchurch at any moment during the flight.
Once on the Antarctic coast, researchers step onto an icy runway where they board a huge, tractor-like bus. Their destination, the U.S. McMurdo Base, offers few creature comforts to soothe weary travelers, says Miller, a veteran of six austral summer expeditions. The McMurdo Base resembles an old mining town, he says, with no plant life and only bare, dirt yards between buildings.
For entertainment, some 1,000 staff members
who live at the base during summer months keep an eye on seals, penguins and the killer whales that shadow ice-breaker vessels to swallow penguins as they fall into the water. From McMurdo, Bartol researchers still must travel three more hours by air to reach the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and the Pomerantz Observatory, named in honor of Martin A. Pomerantz, who served as director of the Bartol Research Institute from 1959 until 1987 and who currently is emeritus director.
"In the late 1950s, the National Geographic Society sponsored an Antarctic expedition by Pomerantz, and he carried the society’s flag to the South Pole," says current Bartol President Norman F. Ness. "He established a strong Bartol presence at the South Pole. The current generation of Bartol scientists has maintained that tradition through several ongoing research projects in Antarctica. These are talented, eager young explorers, and we’re proud to count them among our researchers."
Miller and Spiczak work under the guidance of Bartol Profs. Thomas K. Gaisser and Todor Stanev. Other UD faculty members using Bartol’s extensive Antarctic facilities include John W. Bieber and Paul Evenson. From monitoring stations in Antarctica and eight other locations worldwide, including Newark, Del., Evenson and Bieber study the interaction of cosmic rays with the sun’s rowdy, magnetic wind. Cosmic rays reach Earth "much, much faster than solar wind," Bieber explains, so they may someday help researchers foretell electrical power outages and other mischief caused by solar wind disturbances.
Leonard Shulman, a Bartol electronics engineer and shop supervisor, also makes annual trips to Antarctica, where he maintains the electronic subsystems he built or assembled. "It’s a pleasant place," Shulman says of the South Pole scientific camp, "if you can get past the physical discomfort."
World’s coldest laboratory?
During the austral summer, from November through January, "minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit is a real heat wave," Miller says, and minus 20 to minus 30 degrees F is "pretty much a nice, typical day." By comparison, the temperature drops to minus 100 degrees F during the continent’s winter season.
"People can survive," he notes, "but oil and gaskets freeze and pop. Vehicles can’t be operated safely. Planes can’t take off."
In summer or winter, accommodations at the South Pole are spartan. Roughly 200 researchers annually brave tent-like living quarters during summer months. (Some 25 staffers remain throughout the winter.).
Why would apparently sane researchers subject themselves to such discomfort and danger?
Antarctica is the driest, highest continent on the Earth. With an ice cap some two miles thick, Miller says, "We’re up above a third of the atmosphere, and instruments can collect data on any southern hemisphere sources 24 hours a day over the winter."
Because moisture instantly freezes, the sky above Antarctica is nearly cloud-free, providing researchers with an unobscured view of the stars. And, like the North Pole, Ness says, Antarctica features a kind of "window" in the Earth’s magnetic shield, where cosmic particles zoom toward Earth, unimpeded.
Bartol researchers also visit Antarctica because ice helps reveal certain rare, high-energy space particles as they rocket directly through the planet, says Gaisser.
A mile and more beneath the Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole, the detection system, AMANDA (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array), measures telltale flashes of light generated by an underground dance involving high-energy neutrinos and ice crystals. Most cosmic particles "get absorbed a few feet into the snow and ice," Gaisser says, but neutrinos slam into the Earth, then pop out the other side. As they propel upward from the Earth’s core, they bump into ice covering the South Pole, creating muon particles and generating a characteristic "cerenkov" light, says Spiczak. Miller describes the phenomenon as "like a sonic boom, but with light."
To learn more about the nature of neutrinos and muons–and perhaps how they were formed in space–researchers must drill long, narrow holes to bury strings of photo-multipliers deep beneath the ice. These "backward lightbulbs" generate an electrical pulse in response to light and, therefore, measure muon flashes underground. Using a high-pressure stream of very hot water, Spiczak says, scientists can create a hole just two feet in diameter and over one mile deep. Then, the photo-multipliers must be carefully, but quickly, lowered into the hole, before it refreezes.
Bartol scientists also study various cosmic particles as they shower the Earth’s surface. Near the geodesic dome of the Amundsen-Scott station, a huge array of 120 detectors, spanning some 16,000 square meters of ice, reveals the number of high-energy particles that reach the planet from space. The array, dubbed SPASE (South Pole Air Shower Experiment), is jointly maintained by Bartol and the University of Leeds in Great Britain.
Super-charged particles may be hurled into space by any number of events, including the explosive collapse of dying stars called supernovas, or the highly volatile, twin-star systems known as binary stars. Whatever their origin, the souped-up projectiles pick up momentum as they fly through space.
Once in the Earth’s atmosphere, they interact with nitrogen and oxygen, then shower the Earth with a secondary cascade of particles, which are detected by the SPASE array. Some muons, contained in the cores of these particle showers, have enough energy to penetrate the Earth’s surface, where they can be detected by AMANDA, Gaisser says. "The same cascade events are seen by several different detectors, some of which are located a mile apart," he says.
Investigating the frequency and composition of cosmic showers–and the percentage of particles that penetrate Earth–may ultimately help explain the origins of matter, "if it leads to a deeper understanding of the physical forces of nature," Miller says. "We’re looking at cosmic particles that are 10 million times more energetic than scientists can artificially energize them on Earth. We need to know how nature does that, and where these particles came from."
If researchers can unravel the mysteries of extremely high-energy particles, Miller says, it may be possible to harness all that power for practical applications. And, observational instruments being perfected for use at the South Pole also could support new developments in the medical diagnostics field. In the meantime, he and other researchers say, South Pole expeditions provide crucial, fundamental information about our universe. "You never know what you’re going to learn there. Every trip is a wonderful adventure," he says.
–Ginger Pinholster