First post!!!1!
Welcome to my journal for *Mr. O'Hara's Amazing Antarctic Adventure *[tm]! Of course, I am on the opposite side of the planet right now, in Fairbanks, Alaska, thanks to my hosts at PolarTREC. Why would I be going to the South Pole? To hunt and capture the elusive Neutrino, a mythical beast that is invisible, tiny, and able to move through "regular" matter as if it were nothing at all.
Joining me here in Fairbanks are three of my Knowles Science Teaching Fellows (kstf w00t!): Katey Shirey (2006 Physical Science), Kristen Fancher (2006 Physical Science) and Liz Ratliff (2008 Math), as well as another 15 teachers off to other research projects in other polar areas. There are also some PolarTREC alumni and researchers to share stories of their experiences. More on these in a future post.
The IceCube/KSTF team representing: Kristen Fancher, Casey O'Hara, Liz Ratliff, Katey Shirey.
What to do in Fairbanks in February? Ice sculptures! Dog races! A not-insignificant amount of shivering! There is snow on the ground, a chill in the air, and the days are short. I am recovering from a cold. Slowly.
These days in Fairbanks are pretty good preparation for my trip to the bottom of the world, except that there I will have 24 hours of daylight... a large-scale bummer since it would be pretty incredible to see the Southern Lights first-hand.
OK, a little more about the magical mystical Neutrino. Actually, neutrinos are pretty common; in fact, as you read this sentence there are about 50,000,000,000,000 neutrinos passing through you. Neutrinos are subatomic particles (consider protons, neutrons, and electrons, then think of their weird antisocial cousin) that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light, only on extremely rare instances interacting with the matter we are familiar with. At the south pole, I will be working with scientists to help build a giant observatory under the polar ice to study these neutrinos as they reach earth from the far reaches of the universe.
OK, more on that later.... much later.... I don't even leave until late December 2009!