a full day sweeping

We had nice weather today — maybe -15 degrees C (or 0 F) with relatively light winds and sun — and took advantage of it to have our second full day in the field. We spent the day continuing our sweeping of the blue ice fields from yesterday (see Ryan’s blog). Travel to the location where we left off from yesterday was over an area of the ice field called ‘the pinnacles’ — terrain with scattered knobs of ice and snow, along with numerous small crevasses to watch out for. Both looking for meteorites and watching out for the crevasses at the same time was exciting! Caption: an area in the pinnacles crevasses (the snow-filled lines on the surface) and some of our team in the distance for scale. After sweeping the blue ice in the morning, we stopped for lunch at the large lateral moraine that forms one side of the trough, and took the opportunity to find and collected two large meteorites in the moraine. They were two of the largest we have found to date. Then we swept back over the blue ice field in the direction of camp. Our total number of rocks collected is now 107 — a very respectable number for the number of days we’ve been able to get into the field, although only a small fraction of the number of meteorites that were collected here at Davis-Ward four years ago. We have ~3 weeks to add to our total before the pull-out! Caption: The moraine (dark area off rocks across the middle of the image) where we stopped for lunch, with Ryan Zeigler observing the view. -posted by Shannon and Devon, Dec 29, 2014, Davis-Ward