Antarctic Journal

Today I talked with South Pole doctor Will Silva about altitude sickness and the Pole. It is a harsh environment for humans. There is extremely low relative humidity--it is very dry. It is nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, and it is very cold. The average temp at the Souht Pole is minus 56 degrees F. The temp INSIDE the dome is an average of minus 54 degrees F.

Will says that the best cure for altitude sickness is lots and lots and lots of water, and don't overdo it. I found myself huffing and puffing up "heart attack hill," the gentle rise that leads you out of the dome up onto the snow outside.

Then I spent time talking to scientists who are doing work in the "Dark Sector," a place named so because the scientists there try to keep out as much artificial light as possible. The astronomers at work at the Pole are doing a number of interesting projects. One, Bob Morse, is looking INTO the ice for evidence of the famous mystery particle called a neutrino.

The neutrino was invented by Wolfgang Pauli. It is bascially an accountant's particle, says Morse, the chief scientist for the Amanda Project. It was invented to account for the missing energy in neutron beta decay. A neutron is unstable. It has a life of about 1,000 seconds. It decays into a proton and an electron, and there is energy left over. Pauli invented the neutrino to carry off the extra energy. The neutrino has no charge, no mass and travels at the speed of light. Pauli is known to have said, "My God. I've created a particle that will never be detected." He said that in the 1930s. But in the 1950s it WAS detected by Frederick Reines, who won a Nobel Prize for it.

Neutrino means "little neutral one." Morse calls it "a most intriped messenger particle." A "wonderful, elusive particle."

What Morse is doing is studying what kinds of reactions and energy transactions are taking place "way far out" in space. The way he does that is he tries to trace the path of the neutrino as it comes from "way far out," comes to earth, passes THROUGH the earth, comes up through the ice here at the South Pole, and, along the way, enters into a reaction that produces another particle called a muon. He wants to build a neutrino map of the "way out." He wants to look into the farthest distances for very high energy, violent phenomenon. He wants to know what is going on at the edges of the universe. The way he can do this is...if he can figure out how neutrinos GET here, he can trace them backwards, the way they came, up into the sky. This is all achieved with a series of detectors that Morse has lowered into the ice at the South Pole, to depths of 2,400 meters.

The irony that most astronomers look up, but he is looking down, into the ice, amuses Bob Morse too. The logo for the Amanda project is a penguin looking down into the earth with a big telescope.

After I talked to Bob Morse, I spent time with Finn Barnaby (named after Finn MacChuil, the legendary Irish giant, he said) who told me all about the telescope projects at the South Pole.

He said that the South Pole was ideal for astronomy because it is so cold. It is especially good for him, because he does infrared astronomy. If you want to detect heat in the universe, you want to reduce the amount of "local" disturbance. So, you want very cold instruments.

One of the projets he was involved in over the long South Pole winter was using the infrared telescope to look for evidence of "Dark Matter." Dark Matter is the invisible medium that some scientists think holds galaxies together, including ours, the Milky Way. They think that Dark Matter is lots and lots of really small stars and planets that don't give off enough visible light to be detected. But they do produce heat, so Barnaby is looking for them with a powerful infrared telescope.

Barnaby's infrared telecope, called Spirex, was also the only telescope that recorded all of the amazing interactions that occurred four years ago when the Shoemaker-Levy comet smashed into Jupiter. On Barnaby's wall hangs an amazing, brilliantly colored poster showing the series of impacts.

Another project in the Dark Sector is the CMBR Project, in which scientists are trying to determine exactly when the universe changed from being a place of gases and started coalescing into matter, into "clumps," as Barnaby put it, into stars and planets. "There was a time when atoms dominated the universe," he said. "Then there was a time when they started to be attracted to each other and form THINGS." Well, the CMBR scientists, with the aid of special microwave telescopes, are trying to figure out when that happened. With this telescope, Barnaby said, they can look so far out into the universe that they are looking back about 100,000 years after the beginning of the Big Bang, which happened 9.999 billion years ago.

I spent some time talking to Nathan Hill, who runs the NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) "Clean Air Sector" monitoring station at the South Pole. Hill said that the South Pole has the cleanest air on the planet, so it is a good place to measure differenet gases in the air, to get a planet-wide baseline. His research, or course, shows an increase in CO2, a greenhouse gas, which is contributing to the warming of the planet.

Last but not least, I spent a good deal of time mooning about inside the dome. Inside the dome is a small village of insulated orange buildings, stacked up on top of one another, neslted in under the arching roof. It is dim inside the dome. Inside the orange buildings are offices, a galley, a lounge with a television and a pool table, a small store, a post office, a communications area, and dorms. There is also a tiny hydroponic greenhous. All around the sides of the dome, staked up high, are boxes and boxes of frozen food, from green peas to escargot. There is frost everywhere.

I left of the 21st in the mid morning to go back to McMurdo.

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