I worked in the same building in 03/04 and 05/06, though the last few months it was just to clear stuff before they demolished it. The commute from my room upstairs was nice and short - a bonus.
As cramped as it was, it was still great to work there.
Having done so several times, yes, between about late-October/early-November and mid-February, you can "just fly" to the South Pole. The trip can take as little as 5 days, but 8-10 days is more ordinary. I've been around for periods in the summer where nothing came and went from McMurdo (the logistics hub at the coast, and one node on the trip) for 10 days in a row (and that's not the record).
So for 1/3 of the year, you can get on a succession of airplanes and, weather permitting, get to the Pole in 1-2 weeks. For 2/3 of the year, it's a major, major undertaking to get there (try landing a plane at -85F in the dark... they did that in April, 2001; the other "mid-winter rescues" were after the sun was up but before the regular summer season started).
Even once you are there, it's not exactly a stroll in the park - the data center is a hike out from the main station (15 minutes when it's light, a lot longer in the dark). Yes, we walk. In the winter it gets too cold for weeks at a time to safely operate machinery (below -60F it had better be important, below -85F it had better be an emergency).
Not all the neutrinos, just nearly all. The moon is large enough to catch a statistically discernible (to IceCube) amount of neutrinos, casting a "neutrino shadow" on the Earth.
Yep... and since the density of water is ~1g/cm^3 (1000kg/m^3), it's a *billion tons* of water perfused with sensors.
But that's what it sees - the sensors point at the Earth and the filter software discards muon events that track from the sky, keeping events that come from underneath since muons coming from the Northern Hemisphere decay long before they can reach the detector. Neutrinos survive passing through thousands of miles of rock, so if it comes from the middle of the Earth, it's a neutrino. If it comes from the sky, it could be a neutrino, but chances are, it's a muon.
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison