greetings from Davis Ward! After all those logistic duties and waiting days in McMurdo, I am very proud to announce our first catch of meteorites (and yes, with “s”!!). Everything started early with a cheerful wake-up call from John at 6h40 just to be sure we would be ready at 9h00, and we were ready in advance! ;o) Everybody showed up with big parka and happy face hidden under facial mask for our first training lesson. We went to a moraine area, where our precious extraterrestrial rocks stupidly mixed with more annoying and classical terrestrial stuff. So the goal of the game is to train our eyes to make the difference between the two. We have been quite successful, as we found 12 meteorites! Second step of the training was to learn how to collect them the proper way, without touching them and keeping the correct record. This sounds easy, but now imagine doing this by -20c with wind of 5m/s (feeling like -33c), and this is suddenly not so easy anymore! We went back to the camp for lunch, just in time to see a big white cloud arriving. The wind started to rise, and we have been stuck for the rest of the day, just waiting for the weather to be better. This is of course frustrating after such a great morning but the most important lesson of the day is to be humble with the Antarctic weather. Anyway, we still need to improve the organization of our tents, so this is not lost time… Stay tuned for our next finding! A bientot! -Posted by Vinciane Dec 21 2014, Davis Ward