SCIENCE•ESSAY
The Ice Is Helping Us Understand the Universe. How Much More Can We Build on It?
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics celebrates a remarkable achievement: using a vast detector buried beneath Antarctic ice to reveal high-energy neutrinos from the universe. But the achievement raises a less comfortable question. As science becomes more ambitious, how much more infrastructure, transport and human activity can Antarctica absorb?
The Pathak6 min read