Bruce Koci's Photographs
From Blog:
Bruce Koci's Photographs
Saturday, July 18 2009 UTCTraveled to Madison this past week to work with a dozen or so IceCube colleagues. I was given a DVD of photographs by Bruce Koci with whom I worked during multiple seasons at the South Pole.
There are some amazing photos on the DVD. Bruce was an incredible photographer, a fact that I learned at the Pole in 1998 when he gave a slide lecture there on his travels to Tibet. The lecture described ice core drilling he did for glaciology studies there — a somewhat inhuman feat given the altitude and remoteness of the setting. At South Pole, you can, at least, fly your equipment in on a Hercules LC-130 cargo plane. To drill in the Himalayas, they drove through western China on trucks. When the trucks gave out because of the altitude, they loaded up their equipment on yaks. When the yaks gave out, they carried everything themselves.
Based on the stunning scenery depicted in those photos, I told him I wanted to go on the next trip. I don’t think there was a next trip, however. Bruce died of cancer in 2006.
Though I saw him several times in Wisconsin, I remember Bruce most vividly at the South Pole. It was difficult to distinguish people at a distance given the fact that we were all bundled up in the same red parkas, but you learned to distinguish people by their posture and their walks. Bruce’s parka was always the most grease-stained on station, but even before the stains were visible you could tell him from his unhurried, deliberate, confident walk. He moved across the packed snow like a gradual but relentless force of nature. It is largely thanks to him and the drilling technique he pioneered that AMANDA demonstrated the possibility of neutrino detection in ice and gave rise to its much larger successor, IceCube, which is now roughly 75% complete.
Hopefully a photo gallery of Bruce’s work will be published someday.
J. Jacobsen