Satellite view of the Miller Range.

Welcome to the 2015-2016 ANSMET field season, everybody!   The field season is getting underway and accelerating down the tracks.   John Schutt and Brian Rougeux are already in McMurdo getting our gear together,  and the remainder of the field team are already on their way to Christchurch or leaving in the next 36 hours.

Our targets for the coming field season are the icefields of the Miller Range.  Last visited in 2013-2014, these icefields have been visited seven times previously, yielding around 2500 specimens and including many rare types such as martian and lunar meteorites. There are three large blue ice areas informally called the Miller Range “North”, “Middle” and “South” icefields, as well as many smaller peripheral icefields where meteorites have been found.

In some sense the coming season is a “do-over”.  The last Miller Range field season was severely affected by the shutdown of the government in October of 2013, resulting in cancellation of some projects and a ripple of disturbed logistical support that hurt the remainder (like ours).  For most of the 2013-2014 season we only had 4 people in the field, so we couldn’t meet a lot of our meteorite recovery goals for the region. In 2015-2016, our main focus will be to once again systematically search the South icefield, large areas of which have yet to be visited.

Plans for the end of the season are a little different.  With 10 days or so days left in the season we plan to visit the scattered icefields at the north end of the Miller Range including several smaller icefields scattered along the margin of the Nimrod Glacier. This is the third time we’ve tried to complete our searches in this area;  previous efforts were hampered by fresh snow falls and perversely, lack of wind to clear it off.  The limited efforts we’ve been able to put forward found a lot of meteorites anyway,  so it remains an important target for us.

But not with a full team!   Jim Karner will lead a team of 6 in the nort Miller Range, with Brian Rougeux as his trusty mountaineer. Meanwhile John Schutt and one other lucky individual will head out to the Elephant Moraine icefields.  These icefields and those around them were important targets for ANSMET field parties in the late 80s and early 90’s,  but by the mid-90’s regional snow increases (probably due to a big iceberg in the Ross Sea holding back sea ice) made the area less productive than areas further south.  Anecdotal evidence suggests conditions have gone back to “normal”  (that iceberg is now several years gone) so we’re sending a small team out to gauge the value of more work out there.

The timeline for the season is pretty much our usual-  the whole team should be together in McMurdo in the first few days of December and deployment into the field is planned about a week after that.  I’ll be playing webmaster from home and trying to keep you up to date as things progress. As in previous seasons, most of the crew will be returning to the “civilized world” in the third week of January.

-posted by Ralph (PI of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program)