UAF-led ice drilling project set the stage for a Nobel Prize

UAF-led ice drilling project set the stage for a Nobel Prize

More than three decades ago, a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks achieved a remarkable feat. Using discarded equipment, hot water and endless ingenuity, they melted holes over a mile deep into the Antarctic ice sheet.

Earlier this month, those efforts led to another dazzling accomplishment - a Nobel Prize.

Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, used those holes and many others to house an array of sensors known as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. On Oct. 6, his success detecting elusive neutrino particles using IceCube was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics.

"This is the closest I'll ever get to having any sort of contribution to a Nobel Prize," said Seth Danielson, a UAF oceanography professor who worked as a driller on the project. "It's fun to know I played a very small part."

The drilling effort was led by the Polar Ice Coring Office, which in the 1990s was housed in UAF's O'Neill Building and run by what is today the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. PICO, funded by the National Science Foundation, would send teams all over the world to drill ice cores for research projects.

Even by PICO's standards, the job at the South Pole was ambitious. Halzen's theory was that the cold, stable conditions deep inside the Antarctic ice sheet would be ideal for sensing neutrinos, which are high-energy particles that can only be detected when they collide with an atomic nucleus.

With a modest budget, the team started work in 1991 using leftover equipment from a drilling project at the South Pole a decade earlier. Dale Pomraning, a machinist with experience in Antarctica, was hired by PICO to handle the mechanical work.

Two successful holes that season provided proof of concept, but it wasn't easy. At peak operations about a dozen boilers were running to make about 200 gallons of hot water per minute required for the drilling project.

"Normally people are not hot-water drilling at minus 40," said Pomraning, who has worked at the Geophysical Institute machine shop and UAF Facilities Services since his time with PICO. "You're kind of on the wrong side of business there."

Pomraning became the chief troubleshooter on the project. He figured out what equipment could survive in hostile conditions at the South Pole. He cobbled together winches and figured out how to store thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. Everything needed to fit in the belly of a C-130 Hercules, the only aircraft that would land at the site.

"I don't think it's an overstatement to say that without Dale, the whole operation wouldn't have succeeded," said Danielson, who did electrical work on the project during two field seasons. At that time, the project was called AMANDA - the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array. The AMANDA effort set the stage for IceCube, which called for an even larger deployment of sensors.

Eventually a total of 84 holes were drilled for IceCube, occupying an entire cubic kilometer near the South Pole. That vast network of sensors allowed Halzen to discover neutrinos that had originated far outside our solar system.

Pomraning remembers a prophetic conversation between UAF engineer Bruce Koci, who was the lead driller, and Bob Morris, the project's lead scientist. They speculated that someday IceCube could lead to a Nobel Prize. About 30 years later, it finally happened.

"I wasn't involved in dealing with the science of it by any means, but it is pretty cool that something we worked on ended up with the Nobel Prize in Physics," Pomraning said.

067-27