My favourite story about the construction of IceCube relates to the drilling of the holes to deploy the detector. They used two types of drill, which melt the firn (compacted snow) on top and ice lower down. One is a sort of conical heat exchanger, the other circulates water through a Big water heater on the surface.

In the early days of South Pole Station (late 1950s), supplies were airdropped in - the cargo planes of that era couldn't land on the snow and going overland was very difficult. Many of the parachutes wouldn't open properly, and so lots of supplies (including a bulldozer) and parachutes wound up buried in the snow. South Pole slowly accumulates snow, so that debris has gotten deeper and deeper below the surface over time.

Of course, the holes required to build IceCube had to go deeper than those supplies, but the drill can't go through things that don't melt, so in some cases the holes had to be moved off the nominal grid. According to the story I heard, one of the holes ran in to a bunch of meat, which floated to the top of the bore...