Morgan takes a Snowmobile Selfie

Today was a highly productive day of meteorite hunting, and we’ve now found over 300 specimens! We collected several beautiful achondrites, one of which is particularly intriguing and has gotten all of the ANSMET team especially excited. We woke up this morning to 15-20mph wind blowing so much snow around as to make searching impossible so we couldn’t start hunting as early as we would have liked. Once the wind had calmed sufficiently, we set out to continue searching patches of the blue ice south of camp, near where we’ve found several meteorites. The overcast sky enabled us to see the meteorites particularly well on the ice because of the contrast it creates around them. Unfortunately, that overcast eventually deteriorated into a snow storm. We were all ecstatic about the stunning specimens we were finding so we fought it as long as we could until it became difficult to see and navigate through the sastrugi. During the snow storm, we saw a sun dog – a circular rainbow around the sun with points of relative intensity and part of another circular rainbow tangent to the complete one. This colorful spectacle is created by the refraction of sunlight in ice crystals and occurs in different forms depending on the angle of the sunlight relative to the Earth’s surface, the amount of snow in the air, the size of the ice crystals, as well as other factors.

Sundogs, the 22 deg. halo , the upper tangent arc and the parihelic circle all on display

I had high hopes for the depth of knowledge I would gain and the solidity of relationships I would form being part of the ANSMET team, and my experiences here have surpassed all of my expectations. It is truly an honor to be part of a team comprised of highly skilled scientists who apply their distinct knowledge to the study of meteorites. When I’m not hunting for meteorites here in Antarctica, I’m working towards a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. I study the oxygen isotopic composition of extraterrestrial samples – meteorites and lunar soils and rocks brought back on the Apollo missions – and I’m particularly interested in the composition of water in these samples. We know water is essential to life on Earth so characterizing water in our solar system is important if we’re to understand why life uniquely exists here. There’s a relative paucity of data about water in extraterrestrial samples because it exists in extremely low concentrations. I extract and characterize isotopic water with a higher precision than done before, but the scarcity of water means the sample size required is large, compared to other techniques. This requirement is what showed me, first hand, the importance of acquiring more extraterrestrial material for planetary scientists to study. At a fraction of the cost of a sample return mission, the ANSMET program is the fastest and cheapest way to acquire these crucial extraterrestrial samples. (A note to clarify: all researchers have equal opportunity to study specimens collected by ANSMET. After being curated, samples can be requested from JSC and having been a part of ANSMET gives no priority.) Several of the meteorite samples from which I’ve extracted and analyzed water were collected by ANSMET. I feel honored to be able to collect samples that will be studied one day and to help enable scientific research and progress in a way that past ANSMET teams have done for me and so many other scientists. It is for these reasons that I find myself writing this blog in a tent on top of a 10,000 year old sheet of ice in Antarctica. Also, going to work on a snowmobile is pretty great.

-posted by Morgan (edited by rph)

Note from editor;  that ice could easily be 10x or 100x as old as Morgan thinks…..