The team searching the wind row in the region north of the big tongue. Cloudy skies makes finding the meteorites amongst the rubble difficult. From left to right: Daniela, Jon, Erin, Brian, Minako, Lauren.

The team awoke at Davis Ward to cloudy skies. You can tell when it is cloudy before even stepping outside your tent because the light hitting the tent is diffuse instead of much stronger on the Sun side. Cloudy weather makes for bad meteorite searching conditions because one of the best ways to spot a meteorite amongst terrestrial rocks is the glint from the glassy fusion crust (the outer layer of the meteorite that melted when the meteorite entered the atmosphere), which is most visible in bright sunlight.

After waiting for the skies to clear, the team went out after lunch to collect some previously flagged meteorites. The team went to the wind rows north of the big ice tongue, where Daniela, Minako, and Brian had done some brief searching while the rest of the team was tied up by weather at McMurdo.

Wind rows are areas where rocks collect that are wind blown across the ice. Generally they are good spot to search for meteorites that have collected on the ice. These wind rows had not been searched extensively in previous seasons. Despite the poor visibility due to the clouds, everyone was excited to find we were still able to spot many meteorites in the wind rows. Sometimes we would go to a flag of a previously identified meteorite, and find an additional one (or three) meteorites nearby! Overall we collected 37 meteorites today (14 previously marked and 23 new finds). It seems our eyes have been well-trained over the last week to learn to pick out the meteorites amongst the ordinary rocks. As the photo shows, the wind rows contain a lot of other rocks, many of which are hard to distinguish from meteorites.

Minako points out a meteorite amongst an assortment of completely boring and uninteresting terrestrial rocks. (editor’s note: Physics Boy is pushing my buttons here! The wind sorting is really interesting- I would love to look downwind from here to find wind-rows with slightly smaller rocks (and more meteorites) ad infinitum. And the local rocks are interesting in their own right. Typically they include the Kirkpatrick Basalt, an extrusive endmember of the Ferrar Dolerite, formed during the breakup of Gondwanaland in the Jurassic, and sedimentary rocks from the Beacon Supergroup stretching back toward the Permian).

Searching the wind rows is done on foot, similar to searching moraines. This is different than the systematic sweeps (transects) on the blue ice that we do in a line mounted on our ski-doos. More of the ski-doo sweeps are to come when the skies clear!

Overall, after a bit over a week in the field everyone is in very good spirits. Although we got a late start due to weather and other delays at McMurdo, the team is all super-excited to be at camp, is enjoying the amazing scenery, and everyone is pitching in to collect as many meteorites as we can.

— Robert from Davis Ward