Find the meteorites in this giant pile of every kind of rock in Antarctica. Pfft, easy peasy for this crack team.

We haven’t been in the field a week and we’ve already lost track of the date–Johnny reminded us this evening that today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. This auspicious day loses some of its meaning when you have 24 h of sunlight anyway. Perhaps to native Antarcticans this day just feels SO much brighter than usual, but to me it seems like every other day with no sunset (totally awesome/confusing, as per usual). Today was our first full day of meteorite hunting, and I for one am pooped. You might not think that driving around on skidoos looking for rocks could be tiring, but it turns out to take quite a bit of concentration (especially for newbies like me) as well as a surprising amount of wrist stamina (for the skidoo throttle). Today we searched in the delightfully named Rat Tail Moraine. A moraine is a feature that forms on the margins of glaciers, where the moving ice scrapes rock bits from its confining valley walls and picks them up, or drops out rocks that it grabbed upslope previously. Some of these rocks might be meteorites that went for a glacial ride before being deposited in the pile. All the while the ice continues to grind the rocks below it to powder, which also piles up on the glacier sides. So a moraine is essentially a long pile of unsorted rocks (i.e., many sizes and types) left by the glacier on its edges. When two glaciers meet and join forces, their lateral (side) moraines will meet in the middle where the glaciers touch and continue to be a long line of visible debris in the middle of the now-ginormous glacier. That’s the type of moraine that Rat Tail is, so named (I’m guessing) because it narrows to nothing while curling a bit downslope. Our pal Cole at the Polar Geospatial Center office in McMurdo showed us a great satellite image of Rat Tail before we came out here, which was a very helpful image to have in mind while we were on the ground. Searching in a moraine for meteorites is an exercise in patient pattern recognition–you must scan the 100000000 rocks in front of you without looking at each as an individual, while also attempting to identify The One That Is Not Like The Others. This visit to Rat Tail was a recon trip rather than a full on search, since it hasn’t been searched systematically before now, yet remarkably we were able to recover two meteorites from this giant ratty pile of rocks. Seriously, I was impressed with us. We worked hard for those two meteorites! Now we’re all ready to hit the hay to recover our strength for tomorrow’s search. Total meteorite count thus far: 24 and counting.

–Posted by Nina from the sleepy zone of Sparkle City, 21 December 2015