50 Trillion every second!

With a budget of nearly 300 million, the Ice Cube project, out of the University of Wisonsin at Madison, is the largest science project currently operating in the Antarctic. "Ice Cube" is a massive neutrino detector.

According to Wiki,

"Neutrinos (meaning: "Small neutral ones") are elementary particles that often travel close to the speed of light, lack an electric charge, are able to pass through ordinary matter almost undisturbed and are thus extremely difficult to detect. Neutrinos have a minuscule, but nonzero mass. They are usually denoted by the Greek letter ν (nu).

Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay or nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the Sun, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms. There are three types, or "flavors", of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos;

Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun, and more than 50 trillion solar electron neutrinos pass through the human body every second."

According to the IceCube website,

"The IceCube Neutrino Detector is a neutrino telescope currently under construction at the South Pole. Like its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube is being constructed in deep Antarctic ice by deploying thousands of spherical optical sensors (photomultiplier tubes, or PMTs) at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 meters. The sensors are deployed on "strings" of sixty modules each, into holes in the ice melted using a hot water drill.

The main goal of the experiment is to detect neutrinos in the high energy range, spanning from 10¹¹eV to about 10²¹ eV. The neutrinos are not detected themselves. Instead, the rare instance of a collision between a neutrino and an atom within the ice is used to deduce the kinematical parameters of the incoming neutrino. Current estimates predict the detection of about one thousand such events per day in the fully constructed IceCube detector. Due to the high density of the ice, almost all detected products of the initial collision will be muons. Therefore the experiment is most sensitive to the flux of muon neutrinos through its volume. Most of these neutrinos will come from "cascades" in Earth's atmosphere caused by cosmic rays, but some unknown fraction may come from astronomical sources. To distinguish these two sources statistically, the direction and angle of the incoming neutrino is estimated from its collision by-products. One can generally say, that a neutrino coming from above "down" into the detector is most likely stemming from an atmospheric shower, and a neutrino traveling "up" from below is more likely from a different source.

The sources of those neutrinos coming "up" from below could be black holes, gamma ray bursters, or supernova remnants. The data that IceCube will collect will also contribute to our understanding of cosmic rays, supersymmetry, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), and other aspects of nuclear and particle physics.

Congratulations! I didn't expect you to actually read this far. Your reward - pictures - are oh so close - Yay!

So, to condense what was described above, Ice Cube is a series of 47 holes, each drilled 1 km deep into the Plateau polar ice. Each hole is stuffed with a string of 60 sensors. The result is a sqaure km 'cube' in the ice, which is used to detect neutrinos. Scientists are searching for the neutrino's that have passed all the way through the Earth, through the Antarctic continent, and through the polar cap. Basically, they are using the polar ice cap as a filter, to distinguish between neutrino's from the sun and neutrino's from elsewhere in the universe. These distant neutrino's, once detected, indicate the location of a massive, distant energy sources.

Inside the red shack is a generator that heats the water for the hot water drill. The km deep holes require a very long hoses to deliver the hot water to the drillhead.

All 7 hot water heaters on full blast!

Watch your step - its a km down - you might freeze before you hit bottom.

The sensors, or DOM's, deployed on a string down the hole

Deploying the DOM's

Ice Cube Camp

The Ice Cube Lab, or ICL. The strings of sensors, once deployed down the holes, are connected to a cable that runs underground to the ICL and up the towers, or 'beer cans' on either side of the building. The cables feed into computers on the second floor of the structure, where the data is processed.