It is expensive enough that you only want to use it when necessary, but they [1] built this place [0] with it. The hot water drill they used to bore into the Antarctic ice cycled between +100 degrees C and -40 degrees C daily, which caused it to develop leaks. This tape is one of the few materials that can survive in those conditions and hold the thing together. Nothing else they tried could do it.
Winterover '20-21 here (there are other WOs on HN). We call it "driller tape" because it's was used all the time when the strings were installed (i.e. during drilling). Generally useful stuff for sticking things outdoors, though you do need to be quick with it. We also have a lot of teflon coated cable on station because everything else goes rock solid within a few minutes in winter. I rewired a bunch of people's heated goggles with that stuff (with an adapter for an off-head battery) because the factory cabling would break.
However it's not made by 3M, the stuff we have at Pole now is Nitto P-212 [0][1]. It's possible we or other experiments used 3M in the past - given it's been a decade since we broke the ice - but the stuff on station definitely has that blue/white branding on the inside of the roll.
Just to give an idea of how oddly stringent we are down there, and how experimental a lot of this is - regular things break all the time even in relatively controlled environments. Simple solutions like that tape are preferred where possible. The year before I wintered, the IceCube summer crew had to replace over 100 PSU fans in the cluster with equivalent Noctuas because the OEM ones would fail weekly. We did the same with DOM power supplies - I think we use exclusively Meanwell now. Never had any issues with those in my deployment, so it made quite a big difference. It's a harsh continent :)
To be fair I never spent time on the Pole myself (though I did get to ship one piece of Irreplaceable Science Stuff* thataway...) (*Containing punch cards! Real genuine punch cards! ...as shims.), I just spent some time about a decade ago onsite in China with Jeff, where he talked quite a bit about driller's tape and how we didn't have any there in China. I tracked down the stuff myself based on his description, so I'm not surprised if I got the specific manufacturer wrong.
The 3M stuff certainly looks identical. That said, 361 is only rated down to -54 C and it gets colder than that over winter, maybe Nitto performed better in testing? Honestly I don't think many people could tell you the brand without looking it up, we all call it driller's tape. I used some to attach a solargraph (really, a failed attempt to make a lunargraph) on some railings for most of the winter and it was still there when the sun came up. Can't think of too many things we'd use it for outside though, mostly temporary things or labelling/fixing stuff to poles. The absolute performance probably doesn't matter too much relative to "does it work at -20 to -30 C reliably" (i.e. summer conditions).
If, say, you had a crystal oscillator or voltage reference that is temperature-compensated or oven-stabilized, but also vulnerable to short-term instability due to convection currents or other airflow-related issues, you might wrap it in this type of tape, or use the tape to secure an aluminized heat wrap material that doesn't adhere well enough on its own.
Had the same question. I always have a roll of that aluminum tape around and find uses for it in hot spots. This seems like it could be better in cases where there’s some flex. It’s probably got a lot higher tensile strength than most tapes, too.
[0]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/ [1]: http://www.psl.wisc.edu/projects/large/icecube