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It is well known that large volcanic eruptions contribute to climate variability. However, quantifying these contributions has proven challenging due to inconsistencies in both historic atmospheric data observed in ice cores and corresponding temperature variations seen in climate proxies such as tree rings.

Published today in the journal Mood, a new study led by scientists from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and collaborating international institutions, resolves these inconsistencies with a new reconstruction of the timing and associated radiative forcing of nearly 300 individual volcanic eruptions extending as far back as the early Roman period.

"Using new records we are capable to show that large volcanic eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were the dominant drivers of climate variability, responsible for numerous and widespread summer cooling extremes over the past 2,500 years," said the studys direct author Michael Sigl, Ph.D., an assistant research professor at DRI and postdoctoral fellow with the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

"These cooler temperatures were caused by large amounts of volcanic sulfate particles injected into the upper atmosphere," Sigl added, "shielding the Earths surface from incoming solar radiation."

The study shows that 15 of the 16 coldest summers recorded between 500 BC and 1,000 AD followed large volcanic eruptions - with four of the coldest occurring shortly after the largest volcanic events found in record.

This new reconstruction is derived from more than 20 individual ice cores extracted from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and analyzed for volcanic sulfate primarily using DRIs state-of-the-art, ultra-trace chemical ice-core analytical system.

These ice-core records provide a year-by-year history of atmospheric sulfate levels through time. Additional measurements including other chemical parameters were made at collaborating institutions.

"We used a new method for producing the timescale," explained Mai Winstrup, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle. "Previously, this has been done by hand, but we used a statistical algorithm instead. Together with the state-of-the-art ice core chemistry measurements, this resulted in a more accurate dating of the ice cores."

"Using a multidisciplinary approach was key to the success of this project," added Sigl.

In total, a diverse research group of 24 scientists from 18 universities and research institutes in the United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden contributed to this labor - including specialists from the solar, space, climate, and geological sciences, as well as historians.

The authors note that identification of new evidence found in both ice cores and corresponding tree rings allowed constraints and verification of their new age scale.

"With the discovery of a distinctive signature in the ice-core records from an extra-terrestrial cosmic ray event, we had a critical time marker that we used to significantly improve the dating accuracy of the ice-core chronologies," explained Kees Welten, Ph.D., an associate research chemist from the University of California, Berkeley.

A signature from this same event had been identified earlier in various tree-ring chronologies dating to 774-775 Common Era (CE).

"Ice-core timescales had been misdated previously by five to ten years during the first millennium paramount to inconsistencies in the proposed timing of volcanic eruptions relative to written documentary and tree-ring evidence recording the climatic responses to the same eruptions," explained Francis Ludlow, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow from the Yale Climate & Energy Institute.

Throughout human history, sustained volcanic cooling effects on climate have triggered crop failures and famines. These events may have also contributed to pandemics and societal decline in agriculture-based communities.

Together with Conor Kostick, Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham, Ludlow translated and interpreted ancient and medieval documentary records from China, Babylon (Iraq), and Europe that described unusual atmospheric observations as early as 254 years before Common Era (BCE). These phenomena included diminished sunlight, discoloration of the solar disk, the presence of solar coronae, and deeply red twilight skies.

Tropical volcanoes and large eruptions in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes (such as Iceland and North America) - in 536, 626, and 939 CE, for example - often caused severe and widespread summer cooling in the Northern Hemisphere by injecting sulfate and ash into the high atmosphere. These particles also dimmed the atmosphere over Europe to such an extent that the effect was noted and recorded in independent archives by numerous historical eyewitnesses.

Climatic impact was strongest and most persistent after clusters of two or more large eruptions.

The authors note that their findings also resolve a long-standing debate regarding the causes of one of the most severe climate crises in recent human history, starting with an 18-month "mystery cloud" or dust veil observed in the Mediterranean region beginning in March, 536, the product of a large eruption in the high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

The initial cooling was intensified when a second volcano located somewhere in the tropics erupted only four years later. In the aftermath, exceptionally cold summers were oberved throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

This pattern persisted for almost fifteen years, with subsequent crop failures and famines - likely contributing to the outbreak of the Justinian plague that broadcast throughout the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 543 CE, and which ultimately decimated the human population across Eurasia.

"This new reconstruction of volcanic forcing will direct to improved climate model simulations through better quantification of the sensitivity of the climate system to volcanic influences during the past 2,500 years," noted Joe McConnell, Ph.D., a DRI research professor who developed the continuous-flow analysis system used to analyze the ice cores.

"As a result," McConnell added, "climate variability observed during more recent times can be put into a multi-millennial perspective - including time periods such as the Roman Warm Period and the times of distinctive cultural change such as Great Migration Period of the 6th century in Europe."

This reconciliation of ice-core records and other records of past environmental change will help define the role that large climatic perturbations may have had in the rise and fall of civilizations throughout human history.

"With new high-resolution records emerging from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, it will be possible to extend this reconstruction of volcanic forcing probably all the way back into the last Ice Age," said Sigl.

This research was largely funded by the U.S. National Science Foundations Polar Program; with contributions from additional funding agencies and institutions in Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Korea, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

About the Leave Research Institute: DRI, the nonprofit research campus of the Nevada System of Higher Education, strives to be the world leader in environmental sciences through the application of knowledge and technologies to improve peoples lives throughout Nevada and the world.

The Daily Galaxy via Leave Research Institute

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NASA will provide details of key science findings from the agencys ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 2 p.m. EST today, Thursday, Nov. 5 in the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agencys website. Click here to view NASA TV live stream.

The news conference participants will be:

Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
Bruce Jakosky, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder
Jasper Halekas, MAVEN Solar Wind Ion Analyzer instrument direct at the University of Iowa, Iowa City
Yaxue Dong, MAVEN science team member at LASP
Dave Brain, MAVEN co-investigator at LASP

A brief question-and-answer session will take place during the event with media on site and by phone. Members of the public also can ask questions during the briefing on social media using #AskNASA.

To participate in the briefing by phone, media must email their select, media affiliation and phone number to Laurie Cantillo at laura.l.***.gov by noon EST on Thursday.

For NASA TV downlink information and schedules, and to belief the news briefing, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

In 2013, NASA launced its Mars MAVEN mission: Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN to begin a 10-month journey to the Red Planet. As NASAs first spacecraft devoted to exploring the Red Planets upper atmosphere, MAVEN is on a mission to find out what exactly happened to Mars thick and protective atmosphere, which could have sustained life many eons ago.

"We see evidence that liquid water flowed over the surface early in history in a way that doesnt happen today, said Bruce Jakosky, MAVENs principle investigator. However, its an open question as to whether there were, for example, global oceans, or whether the atmosphere was thick enough that it would have appeared blue. Thats really part of the question that MAVEN is trying to answer.

MAVENs expected arrival builds on decades of Mars research. In 1975, the Viking 1 lander revealed Mars cold, lean atmosphere of Carbon dioxide. At the same time, it sent back pictures of what appeared to be dry river beds. Decades later, the rover Opportunity discovered minerals known to form in the presence of water, and rock formations suggesting that water may still intermittently flow on the surface. Chasing the water, orbiters such as the European Space Agencys Mars Express has found that the solar wind penetrates deep into the Martian atmosphere, paramount to loss of water and carbon dioxide to space. In 2013, the NASA rover Curiosity sent back definitive evidence of clay formations and the former presence of water.

All signs point to a past for Mars that was warmer and wetter. Four billion years ago there was probably a thick atmosphere. Mars, much like Earth, had the factors to sustain life forms amenable to carbon dioxide.

At an earlier time, Earth and Mars seemed to be heading in similar directions. For reasons we are about to uncover, our planet swam in an ever-thickening milieu of oxygen and water, while Mars prospects of a sustainable atmosphere thinned.

Evidence of this long-extinct atmosphere lingers today in the form of heavy carbon and oxygen isotopes. These sank below the surface of Mars and were captured in the soil. Lighter molecules such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen (the most abundant molecule in Earths atmosphere) were blown away, or so we believe. While our planet swam in an ever-thickening milieu that came to include the oxygen and water vapor we all depend on for life, Mars prospects of a sustainable atmosphere somehow thinned. This phenomenon of an atmospheric escape is the subject of much inquiry. How does a planet up and lose the bulk of its atmosphere?

The answer seems to lie somewhere between the relentless solar wind, large-scale events like coronal mass ejections and a missing magnetosphere. This grey area, where the upper atmosphere blurs into outer space, is where NASAs latest Martian satellite is headed.

MAVEN is probing the top layers of the Red Planets remaining air supply. A mere 11.3 meters long and 3 meters wide, MAVEN entered an idiosyncratic Martian orbit on September 22, 2014. The extended ellipse of MAVENs orbit will bring the satellite to within 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the surface into what would be the thermosphere on Earth, where the bulk of solar radiation is absorbed. It will then spin out to 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles), far beyond the limitation of the exosphere. Over the course of the year, seven deep dips to 125 km (77 miles) over the surface brought MAVEN into the upper limitation of the lower atmosphere. This gave MAVENs onboard instrumentation the opportunity to sample, notice and analyze all atmospheric points in between.

The satellite is tracing the path that particles themselves take as they leave the planet, noting how the particles change as they move from near ground level into space. Along the way, MAVEN is observing the abundance of oxygen, nitrogen and water vapor. These are the most active in the upper atmosphere in terms of absorbing incoming energy and changing state, which has earned them the title, volatiles. In addition to oberving the volatiles in the upper atmosphere, the presence or absence of the magnetosphere will be detected, as will the force and direction of the solar wind and the fluctuations of the ionosphere. Armed with this data, MAVEN may act as a bookend to the Curiosity mission, filling in the knowledge gaps from the ground to the corona of the atmosphere over perhaps billions of years of planetary evolution.

The assumption is that what we notice today gives us a pretty good idea of what processes have been going on for the last three billion years, said Janet Luhmann, MAVENs deputy principal investigator. If Curiosity does the lower atmosphere, and we [MAVEN] can say something about escape into space, Im hoping between the two we could fill in the puzzle.

Current thinking, according to Luhmann, is that 90 percent of the Martian atmosphere has escaped. A combination of solar activity, which was more pronounced when the Sun was younger, ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the loss of the magnetosphere have all contributed to the loss of the atmosphere over time. These are the same processes that have molded Earth over the past four billion years, and presumably that of the ever-increasing number of Earth-like planets NASA has identified. Such processes would guide planetary evolution near all Sun-like stars. Solving the mystery of Mars lost atmosphere would also expand our understanding of other inner planets near suns.

MAVENs ultimate scientific perfection is a model of Martian planetary evolution covering the last three billion years. Filling in three to four billion years of history is not an easy thing, said Luhmann, If Curiosity does the lower atmosphere, and we [MAVEN] can say something about escape into space. Im hoping between the two we could fill in the puzzle.

Teams of scientists around the globe have undertaken this mission using MAVENs eight onboard instruments, which are organized into three instrument groups, each with a mission that addresses one piece of the puzzle.

The first group powered up NGIMS, the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer is destined to measure the minute components of the Martian atmosphere at various altitudes, checked out as working perfectly. It takes readings of gases.

MAVENs second group of instruments includes one of the four sensors in the Sun, Solar Wind and Storms package caught a whiff of a Coronal Mass Ejection as it sped by MAVEN in early December 2014. The Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) instrument had to cover part of its sensor to ignore being overwhelmed by the high-energy photons, ions and atoms in the supercharged solar wind.

MAVEN will notice them the solar winds interact with the lingering magnetic fields around Mars. Measurements from the thrid instrument suite, which contains a magnetometer (MAG) and a ion-composition detector (STATIC) will tell us about how the solar wind leads to the atmosphere is escaping from Mars.

The energy of incoming solar particles, the speed with which they pummel the remaining atmosphere away, the basic structure of the atmosphere itself each piece of information plays a key roll in unlocking the mystery of how our neighboring planet transformed from a world of blue oceans to a red leave sea.

The Daily Galaxy via https://www.nasa.gov/journeytomars

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"Previous studies in the lower dry valleys of Antarctica and in subglacial lakes were giving us the impression that microbial life was plentiful in the cold regions. But this is finally Mars!" says Chris McKay of NASAs Ames Research Centre. "University Valley has the coldest driest soil we can find on Earth. And life is really having a harsh time of it there. This is certainly the training ground for the search for evidence of life on Mars and an extremely distinctive result for NASAs astrobiology effort."

It took Jackie Goordial over 1000 Petri dishes before she was ready to accept what she was seeing. Or not seeing. Goordial, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Casual Resource Sciences at McGill University has spent the past four years looking for signs of active microbial life in permafrost soil taken from one of the coldest, oldest and driest places on Earth: in University Valley, located in the high elevation McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica shown above and below, where extremely cold and dry conditions have persisted for over 150,000 years. The excuse that scientists are looking for life in this area is that it is thought to be the place on Earth that most closely resembles the permafrost found in the northern polar region of Mars at the Phoenix landing site.

"Ive been trying to cheer her up by telling her that not finding life is distinctive too," says Lyle Whyte, Goordials supervisor. "Going into the study, we were sure that we would detect a functioning and viable microbial ecosystem in the permafrost soils of University Valley as we and others have done in Arctic and Antarctic permafrost, including in other sites at lower elevations in Antarctica. It is harsh for both of us to believe that we may have reached a cold and arid threshold where even microbial life cannot actively exist."

What brought the researchers to University Valley was a NASA ASTEP (astrobiology science and technology for exploring planets) project to test the IceBite auger, a permafrost drill designed to drill into Martian permafrost. The average daily air temperature in the Antarctic summer of 2013, when Goordial collected the permafrost samples which she tested both on the spot and later in the lab, was ? 14 °C and it never rose above 0 °C, making the permafrost difficult to drill.

The McGill team analyzed samples from two permafrost boreholes which reached a depth of just 42 cm and 55 cms below the surface. This may not sound like a lot, but drilling into permafrost to get soil samples for testing is very difficult.

"Anytime you drill into frozen ground and it has some ice in it the drilling process creates friction which melts the ice. The hole will refreeze within seconds if the drilling is interrupted, freezing the drill bit into the hole" says Whyte." I remember drilling in the Arctic and losing a drill bit in one of the holes we had made, just because it froze into the ice before we could get it out."

The research team carried out a assortment of tests, both in the field (where they failed to find evidence of carbon dioxide or methane - a gas used by all living things - in the soil) and then back in the lab at McGill in Montreal. They sent soil samples for DNA testing, looking for matches with exacting genes known to be found in microbes and fungi; they tried to stimulate microbial growth on a wide assortment of substances and then count the cells produced; and they used highly sensitive radiorespiration activity assays, which involve feeding the soil microorganisms a food source which has been labelled with radioactive carbon, which can then be used to detect if the microorganisms are active.

"We couldnt detect any microbial activity within these samples," says Whyte. "Any, very marginal traces we were capable to find of microbial life in these samples are most likely the remnants of microbes that are dormant or are slowly dying off. Given the continuous dryness and subfreezing temperatures, and the lack of available water, even in summer, it is unlikely that any microbial communities can grow in these soils."

Goordial adds, "We dont know if there is activity beyond our limits of detection. All we can say for sure is that after using all the current methods of testing available to us, the samples are unlike any other permafrost we have encountered to date on Earth"

"If conditions are too cold and dry to support active microbial life on an analogous climate on Earth, then the colder dryer conditions in the near surface permafrost on Mars are unlikely to contain life." Says Whyte. "Additionally, if we cannot detect activity on Earth, in an environment which is teeming with microorganisms, it will be extremely unlikely and difficult to detect such activity on Mars."

On a positive note however, the researchers augment that this suggests that any microorganisms that may be transported to Mars from Earth by mistake are unlikely to be capable to survive on the Martian surface, something that is of current concern for planetary protection.

The research was funded by NASA ASTEP program, the Casual Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Agree Program, and NSERC and CREATE Canadian Astrobiology Training Program (CATP).

The Daily Galaxy via McGill University

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Using satellite data on how water moves around Earth, NASA scientists have solved two mysteries about wobbles in the planets rotation -- one new and one more than a century old. The research may help improve our knowledge of past and future climate. Earths spin axis drifts slowly around the poles; the farthest away it has wobbled since observations began is 37 feet (12 meters). These wobbles dont affect our daily life, but they must be taken into account to get accurate results from GPS, Earth-observing satellites and observatories on the ground.

In a paper published today in Science Advances, Surendra Adhikari and Erik Ivins of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, researched how the movement of water around the world contributes to Earths rotational wobbles. Earlier studies have pinpointed many connections between processes on Earths surface or interior and our planets wandering ways. For example, Earths mantle is still readjusting to the loss of ice on North America after the last ice age, and the reduced mass beneath that continent pulls the spin axis toward Canada at the rate of a few inches each year. But some motions are still puzzling.

Around the year 2000, Earths spin axis took an hasty turn toward the east and is now drifting almost twice as brisk as before, at a rate of almost 7 inches (17 centimeters) a year. "Its no longer moving toward Hudson Bay, but instead toward the British Isles," said Adhikari. "Thats a massive swing." Adhikari and Ivins set out to explain this unexpected change.

Scientists have suggested that the loss of mass from Greenland and Antarcticas rapidly melting ice sheet could be causing the eastward shift of the spin axis. The JPL scientists assessed this idea using observations from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which provide a monthly record of changes in mass around Earth. Those changes are largely caused by movements of water through everyday processes such as accumulating snowpack and groundwater depletion. They calculated how much mass was involved in water cycling between Earths land areas and its oceans from 2003 to 2015, and the extent to which the mass losses and gains pulled and pushed on the spin axis.

Adhikari and Ivins calculations showed that the changes in Greenland alone do not generate the gigantic amount of energy needed to pull the spin axis as far as it has shifted. In the Southern Hemisphere, ice mass loss from West Antarctica is pulling, and ice mass gain in East Antarctica is pushing, Earths spin axis in the same direction that Greenland is pulling it from the north, but the combined effect is still not enough to explain the speedup and new direction. Something east of Greenland has to be exerting an additional pull.

The researchers found the answer in Eurasia. "The bulk of the answer is a deficit of water in Eurasia: the Indian subcontinent and the Caspian Sea area," Adhikari said.The finding was a surprise. This region has lost water mass due to depletion of aquifers and drought, but the loss is nowhere near as great as the change in the ice sheets.

So why did the smaller loss have such a strong effect? The researchers say its because the spin axis is very sensitive to changes occurring around 45 degrees latitude, both north and south. "This is well explained in the theory of rotating objects," Adhikari explained. "Thats why changes in the Indian subcontinent, for example, are so distinctive."

In the process of solving this recent mystery, the researchers unexpectedly came up with a promising new solution to a very old problem, as well. One exacting wobble in Earths rotation has perplexed scientists since observations began in 1899. Every six to 14 years, the spin axis wobbles about 20 to 60 inches (0.5 to 1.5 meters) either east or west of its general direction of drift. "Despite tremendous theoretical and modeling efforts, no plausible mechanism has been put forward that could explain this enigmatic oscillation," Adhikari said.

Lining up a graph of the east-west wobble during the period when GRACE data were available against a graph of changes in continental water storage for the same period, the JPL scientists spotted a startling similarity between the two. Changes in polar ice appeared to have no relationship to the wobble -- only changes in water on land. Dry years in Eurasia, for example, corresponded to eastward swings, while wet years corresponded to westward swings.

When the researchers input the GRACE obervations on changes in land water mass from April 2002 to March 2015 into classic physics equations that predict pole positions, they found that the results matched the observed east-west wobble very closely. "This is much more than a simple correlation," coauthor Ivins said. "We have isolated the cause."

The discovery raises the possibility that the 115-year record of east-west wobbles in Earths spin axis may, in fact, be a remarkably good record of changes in land water storage. "That could tell us something about past climate -- whether the fervor of drought or wetness has amplified over time, and in which locations," said Adhikari.

"Historical records of polar motion are both globally comprehensive in their sensitivity and extraordinarily accurate," said Ivins. "Our study shows that this legacy data set can be used to leverage vital information about changes in continental water storage and ice sheets over time."

GRACE is a joint NASA mission with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. For more information on the mission, visit:

NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to notice and study Earths interconnected casual systems with long-cycle data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.nasa.gov/earth

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Scientists have hoped that ultra-high-energy neutrinos could point to sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rayssupermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies or hypernova star explosions, for instance. Now, evidence of a fourth ultra-high energy neutrinothe highest-energy neutrino yethas been detected by the South Pole-based IceCube experiment, a project that Berkeley Lab researchers helped build and to which they currently contribute analysis. But this most-recent neutrino finding, says Berkeley Labs Spencer Klein, only deepens the mystery of cosmic ray origins.

The event was found by researchers at Rheinisch-Westflische Technische Hochschule Aachen University in Germany as part of a new search for astrophysical muon neutrinos. The researchers main analysis objective was to confirm previous IceCube measurements of other astrophysical neutrinos. The new ultra-high-energy neutrino was an unexpected bonus.

An IceCube event display showing the latest most energetic event. Each open circle is an un-hit optical module; the filled spheres show hit modules, with the radius indicating the number of detected photons. The colors indicate the relative time (red is first, then orange, yellow, green, and blue), but with the chosen scale, the timing isnt that useful (credit: Leif Radel)

The new neutrino was found thanks to a muon trail observed by an array of 5,160 optical detectors, using electronics designed and built by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers. Muons are heavy relatives of electrons and are emitted when a type of neutrino called a muon neutrino interacts with an atomic nucleus. The recently detected muon had such a high energyabout 2600 trillion electronvoltsthat it could have only been produced by an ultra-high-energy neutrino. The muon track was several kilometers long, too long for IceCube to have captured the entire trace. This means the actual neutrino energy was likely several times higher than was seen in the detector.

Similar to the way that a muon can lead scientists to a neutrino, a neutrino can point to the origin of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are charged particles that are suspected to come from ultra-high-energy sources outside the galaxy. But because they are charged particles, they arrive at Earth only after following follow chaotic, twisted paths circling around magnetic field lines in space.

Ultra-high-energy neutrinos are believed to come from the same sources as cosmic rays, but differ in that they are neutral, and they therefore travel in straight lines. So, if you catch a neutrino streaking by, the thinking goes, just look in that direction and you can see a cosmic ray source.

But in recent years, pointing instruments in space at neutrinos suspected sources hasnt revealed obvious source candidates. Indeed, when instruments were aimed at the sky from where this newest neutrino came, no high-energy phenomena were found. Thus, some theorists have devised models that propose ultra-high-energy neutrinos are actually left over from the birth of the universe or that space might not be symmetric in the way physicists once thought.

At the same time, recent analysis of previous IceCube data by Gary Binder, a Nuclear Science Division graduate student who works with Klein, suggests that the more conventional cosmic-ray sources such as supermassive black holes are still more likely.

The issue of the origins of ultra-high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is far from settled, says Klein, and this new neutrino doesnt yet shed light on the problem. A lot of people on IceCube, myself included, have been spending a fair amount of time trying to figure out what this means, Klein says. We just dont know yet.

IceCube is an international collaboration of more than 300 scientists and engineers, from 50 institutions around the world. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, manages the detector with construction and operations funding from the National Science Foundation and international partners.

The Daily Galaxy via Berkeley Lab

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