Since my expedition is still a few months off, I haven't made a whole lot of progress in preparing for my trip... though I did find a nice "mascot" for my classroom. Any suggestions for a name?
My new classroom mascot. Until I can get him to school, he is shown here in his temporary environment - my freezer...
At the end of March, I gave a 20-minute presentation to the regional AAPT spring meeting, I felt a little intimidated since some of the other presenters were "heavy hitters" in the northern California physics teaching community. But it was a smallish group, and I knew what I was talking about (for the most part) so it went smoothly.
On the "Ask the Team" page, Jack asked a great question about human impact in Antarctica. So, I did a little research and came up with some interesting information.
First of all, Antarctica is governed by the Antarctica Treaty System, which went into effect in 1961. 46 countries signed on, to basically set aside Antarctica as a "scientific preserve" - scientific investigation is all good, military activity is all bad.
Over many years, research stations tended to pile up their trash and either burn it, or set it on an ice floe and wait for it to go out to sea... or just leave it in piles. Of course, the cold keeps things from decaying, so it pretty much stays put.
Jim Madsen, IceCube researcher, tells me there is a display in the museum in Christchurch (New Zealand) showing all the junk that piled up in the early research stations.
Since then, the Antarctic-Environmental Protocol went into effect in 1998, with key points being the protection of Antarctica as a wilderness, environmental assessment for all activities including tourism, and preventing activities related to mineral resources (i.e. no mining allowed except for scientific resarch).
Looks like the current policy at McMurdo Station, the main US station, is to send all trash back to the US to be disposed of. This included all the old trash that had collected over many previous years. They also treat all their waste water (including food scraps) before putting it into the ocean. Here is a web site that has more detailed information, this is where I got most of my facts.
http://www.southpolestation.com/env/env1.html
In regards to the environmental impact of the IceCube project, once the strings of sensors are put into the ice, I doubt they are coming out any time soon! The ice has been there for many thousands of years; so those sensors will have a long life buried in it! Maybe in several thousand years, they will be dug out of the ice by future archaologists...