4 ms·

I wonder if the locations researchers are staying at are located on top of the land or if it's just randomly located and could be either. Like if all (or a majo

I wonder if the locations researchers are staying at are located on top of the land or if it's just randomly located and could be either. Like if all (or a majority of) the ice melted how big of an impact would it have on the locations?

frogulis 4y ago
McMurdo station (the biggest one) is standing on land and does thaw in summer [1]. That's on an island at the outskirts of Antarctica though, so I don't imagine it's representative of stations elsewhere on the continent. [1] https://brr.fyi/posts/mud-murdo https://brr.fyi/posts/mud-murdo
ErikCorry 4y ago
What about the actual South Pole? Looks like it might be over water.
- joshvm 4y ago
  The South Pole is also over bedrock, around 3 miles down. See "glaciology" here: https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/research/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/research/ Scientific implications would be IceCube would no longer work, because the premise is based on the detector(s) being drilled 2 km into the glacier. You can't just bury it in rock, it specifically needs a transparent medium and ice is surprisingly good for neutrino propagation. The other telescopes would probably be fine, provided it was still sufficiently dry. SPT and BICEP are mostly taking advantage of the location - e.g. high altitude, extremely low humidity and extremely radio quiet, to a lesser extent the ability to stare at the same patch of sky all year. I guess you'd lose a lot of the environmental advantages, but maybe it would still be a desert. There isn't a particularly good reason why everything is sited there beyond geopolitics. You could pick pretty much any place on the polar plateau and it would be fine. We just happened to luck out at how suitable the ice was for certain experiments. The station is on a moving/shearing ice sheet though, which has some minor implications (like the relative position of the pole changes, so we have to move the marker each year by about 10 m). https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4060 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4060
  - ErikCorry 4y ago
    Fascinating. Is there any benefit to having in a place that rotates in situ rather than going around in circles in a given day?
    - joshvm 4y ago
      I assume you mean located very close to the rotation axis rather than at some other latitude? I think it's convenience, because you can certainly do this at other points close to the pole, but it would involve more slewing I guess and it's mechanically simpler because you don't need to do much field rotation. At the pole, you can practically leave the altitude fixed and only move in azimuth to track something. There are also telescopes in other places that are fixed in place, they stare at some angle and let the Earth's rotation do the work for surveying.

frogulis 4y ago

McMurdo station (the biggest one) is standing on land and does thaw in summer [1]. That's on an island at the outskirts of Antarctica though, so I don't imagine it's representative of stations elsewhere on the continent. [1] https://brr.fyi/posts/mud-murdo https://brr.fyi/posts/mud-murdo

ErikCorry 4y ago

What about the actual South Pole? Looks like it might be over water.

joshvm 4y ago
The South Pole is also over bedrock, around 3 miles down. See "glaciology" here: https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/research/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/research/ Scientific implications would be IceCube would no longer work, because the premise is based on the detector(s) being drilled 2 km into the glacier. You can't just bury it in rock, it specifically needs a transparent medium and ice is surprisingly good for neutrino propagation. The other telescopes would probably be fine, provided it was still sufficiently dry. SPT and BICEP are mostly taking advantage of the location - e.g. high altitude, extremely low humidity and extremely radio quiet, to a lesser extent the ability to stare at the same patch of sky all year. I guess you'd lose a lot of the environmental advantages, but maybe it would still be a desert. There isn't a particularly good reason why everything is sited there beyond geopolitics. You could pick pretty much any place on the polar plateau and it would be fine. We just happened to luck out at how suitable the ice was for certain experiments. The station is on a moving/shearing ice sheet though, which has some minor implications (like the relative position of the pole changes, so we have to move the marker each year by about 10 m). https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4060 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4060
- ErikCorry 4y ago
  Fascinating. Is there any benefit to having in a place that rotates in situ rather than going around in circles in a given day?
  - joshvm 4y ago
    I assume you mean located very close to the rotation axis rather than at some other latitude? I think it's convenience, because you can certainly do this at other points close to the pole, but it would involve more slewing I guess and it's mechanically simpler because you don't need to do much field rotation. At the pole, you can practically leave the altitude fixed and only move in azimuth to track something. There are also telescopes in other places that are fixed in place, they stare at some angle and let the Earth's rotation do the work for surveying.