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©
PPer Olof Hulth
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Bubbles
see rising from below as the camera following the module
hits the surface of the water.
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A
literary essay about AMANDA by Francis Halzen
page 6
Still,
convincing donors of the soundness of our idea was no simple
matter: I was only a theorist, after all, with no experience
building anything, and my collaborators, at least in the beginning,
were very talented but very junior physicists at the University
of California, Berkeley. Nevertheless, NSF was willing to
give us the benefit of the doubt, and within a few years we
had joined forces with eight other universities and three
research laboratories in Belgium, Germany, Sweden and the
United States. In 1990, as proof of principle, one of our
teams sank a 200-meter-long strand of three photomultipliers
into the packed snow of Greenland. The toy experiment detected
muons. Then, in the Antarctic summer of 1992, our work began
in earnest.
AS
I WRITE, it is ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit outside my
office in Madison, and I am dressed just warmly enough to
be slightly cold. In most places, I think, people have made
an art of underdressing in winter. But not in Antarctica.
Faced with temperatures that regularly dip to negative fifty
degrees Fahrenheit, even on a summer’s day, our drillers
and engineers wear outfits akin to the space suits worn by
astronauts on the moon. They live in a comfortable base camp
with a wonderful professional chef, and the few times they
expose themselves to the elements are when they relax themselves
in the pools of hot water created by the AMANDA drills.
In the heroic early days of AMANDA, before a heated, portable
hut was built for each drilling site, there were some tough
stretches. Teams of ten people sometimes worked up to twenty-four
hours without a break—often without gloves when assembling
delicate components. But on the whole, the work has been astonishingly
unadventurous.
The true challenges have been technical and logistical. Typically
we fly 100,000 pounds of cargo and forty people from Christchurch,
New Zealand, to the South Pole each summer—enough to
fill twenty Hercules C-130 transport planes. It is a massive
undertaking, but one accomplished with the utmost efficiency:
where Antarctic research is concerned, there is no margin
for excess baggage of any kind—be it fiber-optic cable,
canisters of fuel or theorists with no real business on the
ice.
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