That's the kind of thing where I can't even imagine how the project conceivers and directors can even have the creativity and chutzpah to envision a $300 million dollar lab made by boring dozens of tubes 2 kilometers into the south pole to create a giant cubic kilometer of sensors.
There are precedents for this. ANTARES and DUMAND both used similar approaches although they used strings in the Mediterranean and Pacific. I suppose using ice makes things easier in that you don't have to worry about sealife and ocean currents but the logistics are going to be a lot tougher and there's probably more ambient light to worry about.
> The incredible clarity of the Antarctic glacier, revealed by the construction and operation of IceCube, will allow the spacing between light sensors to exceed 250 meters, instead of the current 125 meters in IceCube. The deployment of sensors on strings with larger spacings will enable the IceCube-Gen2 instrumented volume to rapidly grow at modest costs.
I worked with a former SW technical coordinator who came right from IceCube. The software that runs their analysis and stuff like that is insane. Many, many terabytes of data to crunch. It's very cool stuff
I did an internship with the Amanda (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) project - IceCubes "Pathfinder" - in the mid-1990s, and found it one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. There are over 30 years of work from hundreds of people in this project, and to see how it has really made it from "madcap folly" to "a new lens to the universe" gives me the shivers. Hat's off to them.
Incredible to image a square kilometer of pure ice transformed into a sensor to detect rare subatomic particles!