Basically, when you want to find a right spot in Antarctica for finding meteorites, you need a place where the ice is vertical (because blocked by an obstacle, like a mountain), and is ablated by wind in order to free all meteorites kept within the ice. So...
Yearly Archives: 2015
Today started auspiciously -- with a resupply fight -- which, even though we didn't actually get the resupply items we requested, brought us something even better. . . . We had been waiting several days for our resupply flight, which always seemed to be a backup for another flight. ...
Today’s weather dawned cool, clear, and windy (you know, for a change). Luckily the wind had dropped to a borderline value of ~12 mph, just enough to stream some snow across the surface and make us very uncomfortable. On a normal day, we might not have gone out (since...
After two and a half tent days, we are finally out in the field again. It’s still pretty cold (-5° F), but the wind is not quite as strong as it has been (still cold enough though that we went back to camp at lunchtime to warm up a...
So for the second straight day we are trapped in our tents. Not trapped in our tents in a “trapped by an avalanche” or “scary monster prowling outside” kind of way (unless you count when Johnny walks to the poo tent), but by something far more insidious…the wind! Today...
IMG_0958_2sec.mov
We don't have much new to report -- still waiting for the resuppply flight, and cold winds blowing around the snow are making it virtually impossible to hunt meteorites, so another tent day today. . . .
But we have video to document the conditions! The clip is short, but...
Continued high winds are kicking up lots of snow over the surface. And the winds combined with some colder temperatures (roughly -20 C or around 0 F), the wind chill is down around -30C. So we have another tent day today. I'll use this blog to talk a bit...
Yesterday was a tent day, and the worst kind of tent day; it was a marginal tent day. That may seem counterintuitive, since very bad weather would seem to make a worse day. See the thing is, inside your tent the weather outside is largely immaterial, thus on a...
The weather was a bit crazy today. As for the past 2 days, we were back up to get a resupply flight, so I got to take and pass to McMurdo weather observations for the flight weather forecasters. I took one at 6am and at 7am -- and they...
To clarify, we’re pretty much always awesome (especially me), but today we were particularly awesome. We collected 37 meteorites, and found (but didn’t collect) another 8 meteorites. Now, for the ANSMET vets, I know what you’re thinking…Meh. But there were several sets of extenuating circumstances that makes 37 quite...