As much as I like to think I am clever, and to make these blogs funny (and informative), after two straight days of searching for 8+ hours in the wind and the cold, I’m mostly trying not to nod off and fall asleep in my one pot meal. Thus, this post is going to be a bit more straightforward; a “just the facts Ma’am” version if you like (or as close to this as I can come).

During our first week or so here, the weather was considerably unsettled, being both very windy and very snowy (by Davis Ward standards), which limited our ability to hunt for meteorites. The last two days have been more like what I got used to during my last trip to Davis-Ward, namely 0 F with 10-15 mph of wind (so not tropical, but more bearable). The good weather over the last few days meant we could finally get out for full days of searching, doing large sweeps of the blue ice areas, coupled with moraine searches at the end of each sweep.

Note: The good weather started just after Ralph left for the season. I’m Just Saying.

Now yesterday was a bit brisk, with wind right at the limit (15 mph) of what we can search in, partly due to comfort, but mostly because at >15 mph snow starts to blow across the surface of the blue ice and obscure everything. Today was much more reasonable, with almost no wind in camp and <10 mph of wind while searching. The extra 5 mph of wind may not seem like much, but trust me, it makes all the difference. Both days we did very long sweeps, mostly into the wind (again, the extra wind speed from the snowmobile speed makes a difference), and then searched a moraine at the end which I have taken to calling the $%^& %^&U*ing %^&* Moraine (name redacted due to NSF overreaction fears). This moraine is just full of coal, polished black basalt, and approximately a bazillion rocks. Still, we’re finding half of our meteorites in there.

For you stat heads out there, we brought in 29 meteorites yesterday and 41 meteorites today (that’s 70 total for the geologists in the crowd), which brings our total for the season to 148, which means we’re already about ½ way to the total that any of the last three seasons got. I’m not saying that makes us better than them, but it sure seems that way doesn’t it? Even more exciting we found a “suspected” ordinary chondrite today the size of a football (and several the size of softballs yesterday), we found a “suspected” carbonaceous chondrite the size of a softball today, and we found a small “suspected” iron meteorite, that was oriented with regmaglyps on the trailing side.

-written by Ryan Zeigler, Davis-Ward, 12/30/14

P.S. An early Happy New Years to all of my friends and family out there, especially Nhat Anh!