Breaking the ice

Antartica. An icy world of whiteouts, bone-chilling cold and eight-month winters of permanent darkness.

But it is here at the South Pole, the most inhospitable place on the planet, that a group of scientists and engineers from over 20 institutions in seven different countries will next month begin work on one of the world’s largest, strangest and most inaccessible scientific instruments.

IceCube is a neutrino detector. When it is finally completed in around 2010 the $250m (£146m) observatory will use 1km3 of ice, more than 2km below the surface at the South Pole, to detect these messengers from some of the most violent events in the universe.

Very little is known about neutrinos, but they are believed to carry information about the birth of our galaxy and the mystery of black holes.

Physicists think that they are born when violent cosmic events, such as colliding galaxies or distant black holes, occur at the very edges of the universe. Able to travel billions of light years through space without being absorbed or deflected either by magnetic fields or by atoms, these mysterious high-energy particles could provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the universe.