AMANDA \& IceCube: Status and Prospects

With 677 optical sensors buried in South Pole ice at depths between 1.5 and 2 kilometers, AMANDA-II is currently the largest high-energy neutrino telescope in operation. Searches for extraterrestrial neutrino sources in data collected with this array since its completion in 2000 have so far yielded null results. Construction of the much larger IceCube array began in early 2005 and is scheduled to continue for another four years until a volume of 1 km3 is instrumented with $\sim$4,500 sensors. In this talk I will summarize some of the AMANDA-II results and I will describe the performance of the first elements of the technologically superior IceCube array.