Spoolhenge

CHAPTER 13

Another little oddity of the South Pole… on the outskirts of the station, in a desolate area aptly referred to as the End of the World, there is a huge, monolithic arrangement of empty cable spools. They call the creation Spoolhenge for a good reason.

The spools came from the host of science experiments operating around the station that required hundreds and thousands of feet of electrical cable during construction. For example, one current experiment called IceCube has installed thousands of neutrino detectors down in the ice to a depth of 1 kilometer, over an area of 1 square kilometer, thus constructing a neutrino “telescope” that is one cubic kilometer in size. I’ll write more about IceCube and neutrinos later, but suffice it to say that IceCube alone used well over 100 kilometers of cable.

The cable comes wrapped up on these massive spools, each one taller than me, which are flown down on the big C-130 Hercules’s. Flying the spent spools back out would be a huge drain on resources, so what to do with the spools? Some creative polie with too much time on their hands started playing around with the front-end loader and came up with the rather unexpected sight of Spoolhenge.