Marianne Mader, Dec 14, 2012 Systematic Team, Mt. Mount Bumstead Icefield Camp, Beardmore Region

Yesterday we moved from our temporary camp at the Otway landing strip to our first ‘home away from home’ near Mount Bumstead (see photo of our camp). The weather has been beautiful – blue skies, low winds (~5-6 knots) and a steady -20 deg Celsius. With our cold weather gear, it feels like a brisk fall day (in Canada, that is).

Today we finished setting up our camp in the morning – it’s now equipped with solar panels and our GPS base station – and then went hunting in the afternoon! We’re targeting the blue ice at the base of Mount Bumstead where about a dozen meteorites were found during previous seasons. Armed with all our sampling equipment, flags, differential GPS, and keen eyes we did a reconnaissance sweep of the ice near camp. We lined up horizontally, each skidoo ~ 10 m apart from each other, and slowly drove across the ice. There were a few moments when it really hit me – “I’m in Antarctica hunting meteorites! Then it was back to scouring the ice for dark rocks…

And dark rocks we found! Initial sightings led to many stops, dropping onto our knees or stomachs to get a closer look. After the first hour or so, we realized the enormity of our task. All of the black rocks we had spotted are volcanic rocks, likely from Mount Bumstead, a sequence of basaltic and doleritic rocks. The good news, is that we used this opportunity to have a tutorial on ‘meteor-wrongs’ (see the picture of a collection of volcanic rocks that had quickly become the bane of our search efforts, layered Mount Bumstead is in the background!). The notable feature of these ‘meteor-wrongs’ (as opposed to ‘meteor-rights) is that they had angular edges. Most meteorites have rounded edges caused by ablation during passage through Earth’s atmosphere. For the next 2 hours we continued our search efforts, specifically looking at the shapes of the dark rocks, unfortunately, the jagged volcanic samples are all that we found. The silver lining on our ‘dark cloud day’, is that there is a lot more blue ice near Mount Bumstead to search and we’re here for another 4 days! Our eyes are quickly adjusting to the local rock types, and we’re optimistic that our hunting will yield some ‘meteor-rights’.

Stay tuned…