A view of the Shackleton Glacier Camp (SHG) from the 2016-2017 season.

Hello everyone!  If you’re a long-time follower of ANSMET,  welcome back!  And if this is your first visit, you’ve arrived at a great time.   We’re getting ready for ANSMET’s 41st field season, which will begin in mid-November of 2017 and end in early February of 2018.

The shortest way to describe our plans for the coming season is that they are a “redo” of last year’s plans.   Last year severe plane issues led to a fuel shortage, and that led to a dramatic last-minute change of targets for our program (you can read all about last year, or any year, by scrolling back or seaching categories on the right).   After an additional year of planning, the US Antarctic Program assures us they can make our ambitious plans work this time, so here we go.

The basic plan is as follows.  We’ll send 8 people to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station,  the mountaineers arriving in mid November to start season preparations,  and the rest following just after the US thanksgiving holiday.  After about ten days of training and packing, the ANSMET team will then be flown to Shackleton Glacier Camp,  which serves as an intermediate staging site for our team as well as many other science groups.

Once at SHG,  the ANSMET team will divide into two independent field teams.  One four-person team (team A, also known as “team Systematic” or “Varsity” ) will go to the icefields surrounding Mts Cecily, Raymond and Emily,  also known as the Grosvenor Mountains and the home of the GRO meteorites. Jim Karner will lead this team, assisted by mountaineer Brian Rougeux.   This is a beautiful site that was first explored in 1985, revisited about a decade later, and in spite of a few tries hasn’t been successfully visited since (it was a planned second target during seasons at nearby Larkman Nunatak). Team A will stay at these icefields for the entire season, and if weather allows may even finish our recovery efforts at this site (one of the homes of the GRO meteorites).

The second four-person team (Team B, also known as “Team Recon” or “Junior Varsity”) will be led by John Schutt and will be dedicated to reconnaissance. The team’s targets are several interesting icefields in the headwaters region of the Amundsen Glacier, only one of which has been previously visited (Mts Wisting and Prestrud, where 26 meteorites were recovered in a few days in 1995). ANSMET conducted a pre-deployment overflight of the region in 2016 that allowed us to prioritize targets and establish landing sites, and we hope to visit three of them over the course of about 5 weeks. The chosen sites include the icefields around the Nodvedt Nunataks,  along the Amundsen Glacier,  and a revisit to Mts Wisting and Prestrud.  The team may also get a day or two of helicopter support that allows them to explore some smaller icefields were a fixed-wing plane is harder to land.  The main goal for Team B is to get boots on the ground and fully evaluate the meteorite recovery potential of each site.   A specific challenge for this year is that SHG is not likely to be available as a staging area in the future;  so if a promising concentration is found,  we’ll have tough decisions to make about how that team’s time is best spent (whether to stay and “finish” recovery at an icefield,  or move on to explore other new icefields).

There are some programmatic issues to note as well.   USAP’s solution to some of the plane problems from last year has been to keep their big ski-equipped cargo aircraft (the LC-130) on the ice from mid-December to the end of January, not allowing them to ferry cargo or passengers between McMurdo and New Zealand.  Each such trip takes an aircraft out of the program for about 5 days,  so this new policy is designed to keep the planes available for science at the height of the austral summer field season.  Taken at face value the new policy doesn’t have a huge impact on ANSMET (since our fieldwork runs from mid-December to late January anyway), but it is a wholesale change to how McMurdo and McMurdo-based science has operated for most of the last 50 years.  It would be foolish to suggest it won’t cause disruptions,  and realistically this season is a test.

That’s it for now.   Updates to this blog have officially begun and will continue through the end of the season. We’ve updated our blogging hardware for the season, which should make it easier for the ANSMET teams to post things from the field,  but don’t expect too much (bandwidth of the Iridium satellite system hasn’t changed, remaining at about 5200 baud, which was state-of-the-art in 1990). The next big event in our calendar is the inaugural ANSMET “Boot Camp”,  a pre-season training experience that will take place over the last weekend of October.   We’ll update the blog several times around then,  so stay tuned.

-Posted by Ralph Harvey,  ANSMET Principal Investigator,  from Case Western Reserve University.