Last week at the Pole was a time of team building. With the newest members of the winterover crew having recently made it to the Pole prior to station close, they’ve been engaged in a number of exercises and activities to build camaraderie among the group, who will spend the next six months together in dark isolation at the bottom of the world. One such challenge was building cardboard airplanes as a test of both collaboration skills and engineering abilities. But it also required a clean-up effort afterward, as the gym needed to be arranged for the traditional viewing of all three versions of “The Thing” to start off the winter. This year, the screening was scheduled to include a live interview beforehand, but with the interviewee needing to postpone, the whole event has been delayed. But it hasn’t stopped them from enjoying the large projection screen in the gym for other fun viewing. Last week, IceCube’s winterovers were also involved in some computer maintenance tasks, continued ERT training, and helping out the BICEP winterovers with their calibration activities.
