Brian on his skidoo in front of the mountain with its breathtaking crevasses and icy structures.

Collecting a meteorite: Juliane (left) dropping the rock into a sterilized bag that Barb hold (right). Brian’s legs are in the background.

Last night I woke up to our tent shaking and rattling like I never had heard or felt before. I was certain we would get blown away but at 7am when the alarm went off we were still here. Phew. The wind was still howling and we could hear the snow being blasted against our tent wall so our spirits dropped a bit since that usually means unsafe weather conditions and thus tent day. And we really wanted to go out today. But as we had feared weather was unsafe so the morning was spent sleeping some more, eating, reading, chatting, and working on papers. After lunch things finally quieted down and we decided to go out for a few hours searching for meteorites. What we had totally forgotten about was that we hadn’t covered our skidoos. So the snow had been blown into the engines. Our first order of business was to clear out ALL…THE…SNOW from inside the engine and then dig out the rest of the skidoo. It took forever. But after careful tending the skidoos started up just fine. So we went off to search a new ice field closer to camp. The landscape was breathtaking. The mountains were covered with massive amounts of snow and glaciers that had huge crevasses and ice structures that looked more like snow caves. The wind was still blowing 15-20 knots and snow snakes were slithering across the blue ice and up the mountains. The wind blew the snow across the crevasses and up the vertical ice walls. It looked like as if the snow was defying gravity. It was absolutely mesmerizing and we spent several minutes being totally enchanted by this nature display. So so so beautiful. And cold, the wind was biting us. Antarctica is magical, beautiful, and mesmerizing, but it tries to kill you every second you are here. And so we started traversing and sweeping this new ice field. We worked for about 4 hours but only found and recovered 3 meteorites. But 3 is better than none. We still have to finish sweeping this ice field in the next couple days so who knows what kind of treasures we will still find. Our spirits were high on our return to camp despite the cold and the few meteorites and we are looking forward to more good weather days. Now it’s dinner time.