The sun is constantly shining, the expanse of ice and snow stretching for miles in all directions is amazing — but the walk to work through minus 30 degree temperatures at an altitude of nearly 10,000 feet is no picnic.
In other words, it’s just another summer day at the South Pole.
For two Park Ridge natives, the icy, barren terrain of Antarctica doubled as home and office this past January during what is the Southern Hemisphere’s summer season.
Michelangelo D’Agostino, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley, and Paul McGuire, an information technology specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, spent five weeks at the South Pole working on a scientific experiment called the IceCube Project. The project involves the construction of a telescope at the South Pole that will detect invisible subatomic particles from space called neutrinos. The data that is collected will be useful for astronomers in understanding more about the galaxy, D’Agostino said.