Ice Fishing for Neutrinos
One afternoon in February 2000, after a long day’s drilling, Bruce Koci and I sat together on the sand in the volcanic crater on the 19,000-foot summit of Kilimanjaro. As we leaned against our packs and watched the sun set, he reminisced about his career.
“I never was in the drilling business to be a driller. I hate machines. Maybe one of the few engineers in the world you’ll ever find that feels that way about them. I hate them … That’s one of the few times I will ever fly into a rage is over a machine that does something that it shouldn’t do.”
“I’m here for the experience. I came into this thing as a canoeist. I walked out of good aerospace job and decided to go into ecology and then got back into engineering through glaciology, starting at Minnesota. I’ve always come for the place; I haven’t come to do the drilling. I’ll do my damnedest to make sure the drilling goes well, because that means I can go to another good place.”
He had not quite earned a degree in glaciology, and was, he recounts, “rapidly running out of time, when all of a sudden I got this call that the University of Nebraska was looking for someone with a degree in engineering and some understanding of glaciology. So I called them up, got hired over the phone in, like, mid-October, and was on a plane two weeks later for the Ross Ice Shelf.”
The Ross Ice Shelf floats on the surface of the sea by McMurdo Station in Antarctica
