Isn’t this the face of a troublemaker right here? He’s planting ALL THE FLAGS to claim this sweet jump as his own.
We had a full and fruitful day of searching today, with 68 samples recovered–and one appears to be a pallasite! If you’re not familiar with these lovely meteorites, they are a beautiful mixture of iron-nickel metal and a green-gold mineral named olivine (also called peridot if you’re into gemstones). Do a Google image search to see a picture of one that’s been sliced open. Pallasites represent a very specific location within large parent bodies in our solar system: the core-mantle boundary. When a planetary body is big enough, the pull of gravity will cause the heaviest materials to slowly migrate to the center of the body and the lighter materials will move to the outer parts and surface. We say that these planetary bodies are “differentiated.” The Earth is massive enough to be a differentiated body, which is why it has an iron-rich core. The Earth’s middle section is called the mantle, and it contains large amounts of olivine. Right at the boundary between the core and the mantle, there is a mixing of the core materials (iron-nickel metal alloys) and the mantle materials (olivine). The Earth’s core-mantle boundary materials are safely locked away in its interior; but when we find these materials as a meteorite, we know that somewhere in our solar system a differentiated body experienced an enormous impact that was large enough to smash all the way into its core-mantle boundary. Pretty awesome! And also very beautiful. Pallasites are frequently used as stones in jewelry because they are so lovely. The one that we found won’t be made into any baubles, but it will tell us a story about a large asteroidal body that once existed in our solar system at some time in the past and was subsequently smashed to smithereens (one of which made it to the Miller Range and in front of our skidoos). I for one can’t wait to see the first analysis on our beauty!
Other than our exciting pallasite, we also had some additional excitement with skidoo riding. I’ll preface this story by saying that there has been some exciting driving from the team newbies from the very beginning. On our first skidoo lesson, Con accidentally drove up a tall snow ramp that had an unseen dropoff on the other side. He was very confident in his driving decisions, so the rest of us (Ellen, Cindy, and Nina) just followed him up like a bunch of lemmings, to the terror of our poor instructor James. It’s been a running joke ever since then that Con likes to take skidoo jumps whenever possible. For the record, Con is a very safe and responsible skidoo driver, so our joke is oh so hilarious. WELL. Today we were driving in a search formation, and I looked to my right and saw Con’s skidoo completely on its side. Turns out he hit a small sastrugi (snow drift) at just the wrong angle and it tipped him over. Or so he claims–I’m pretty sure he was trying for some sweet air. In my mind Con was going for a backflip off an ice ramp at 90 mph. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
–Posted by Nina in the XTREME ANSMET CAMP, south Miller Range, 4 January 2016 Caption: