Station Maps

It took me some time, but I found some decent maps of the station to help you get some perspective. The maps come from the website www.southpolestation.com which probably has some other good resources.

I can't seem to get the images to display at a reasonable size in my blog page, so I'll include links to the maps I'm talking about.

The first map shows Antarctica oriented to what is known as grid north. Because any direction from the South Pole is north, the powers that be decided to take the map of Antarctica and orient the continent so the prime meridian is considered grid north.

The second map is a little bit more zoomed in and you can see the different sectors. Because the wind direction is fairly constant, they established the Clean Air Sector upwind to do some environmental monitoring. The Quiet Sector contains sensitive seismic and radio instruments and the Dark Sector contains light and radio sensitive instruments. All the different sectors have appropriate restrictions to limit the interference with the instruments there.

The third map zooms in a bit more and you can see the hexagonal cluster of holes that make up the IceCube experiment. It is that experiment that we are piggybacking on at the moment. IceCube is a major ($270 million) experiment whereas ours at the moment is about $100k. If all goes as we want, we would get additional funding to expand our experiment to be many times the physical size of IceCube but at a fraction of the cost. The testbed site is about 2 kilometers from the western edge of the IceCube array.

The fourth map gives the layout of the station itself. The map is a bit dated though. For example the actual South Pole is now more in line with the middle of the elevated station and the dome has been dismantled. I work in the Ice Cube Laboratory, at our testbed site (not shown on the map), and at the drillers camp inside the IceCube array (not shown). The IceCube array is now complete and I was there last Saturday as they were lowering down the last string.