of few months a year, Jim Haugen can be found at the South Pole tending to a cluster of very deep holes filled with sensors. The apparatus, called the IceCube, is a sort of inverse antenna array extending 1.6 miles down into Antarctica’s thick carapace of ice. It was built to capture information about neutrinos, subatomic particles from space that astrophysicists believe could answer fundamental questions about the
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universe. Haugen, an engineer, helped build the IceCube—complicated and dangerous work, much of it performed outdoors during the brief Antarctic summer— and now he maintains it. “We start arriving early in November, when the temperature is in the minus 40s Fahrenheit. You get a little bit of wind, and it’s easily minus 60 or 70. By December it transitions through the minus 30s into the minus teens,” says Haugen, a son of Green Bay, Wis., who tends toward understatement
on the weather. “And then in January, it starts getting cold again.” Haugen’s IceCube tours all begin the same way, at the U.S. Antarctic Program’s clothing distribution center in Christchurch, New Zealand. There he’s issued a pair of insulated Carhartt overalls, a fleece jacket, long underwear, mittens, goggles, a hat, waterproof boots, and a bulky, cardinal-colored down parka made by Canada Goose. “Big red,” as it’s called, is one of the warmest coats on
