Now, a quote from Karate Kid may seem like an odd subject line for a blog about correcting meteorites. Also, I realize that past blogs from me have a history of being slightly wanderingy (I’ve decided that this is in fact a word), but stay with me and this will all make sense eventually.

Note: Like one really needs a good reason to bring up quotes from a masterpiece of American Cinema. My tent mate (Jim Karner) and I just had about a 10 minute conversation about which other quotes would be good for future blogs…and then another 10 minute discussion about the movie (this is following a 10 minute discussion each about the relative merits of the hockey movies Youngblood vs. Slap Shot earlier today). Things are admittedly a little slow out here without the internet to keep us distracted.

In any case, we lost our sensei today (first Karate Kid reference)! Ralph has officially left the building, though not the continent. Our first resupply saw a Twin Otter land at camp bearing gasoline, propane, and few camp necessities. It left with our excess baggage, our trash, our human waste, and our Ralph (to be very clear, those are four separate things). Ralph has started his long, but if all goes to plan, relatively brief set of flights back to the world (leave for New Zealand tomorrow, leave for Cleveland the following day, arrive in Cleveland that same day). Joking aside we are sad to see Ralph leave as he brought a great deal of experience and fun to our work day (although we are happy to have the extra room in the science tent for our evening meetings). Still, we are in good hands with Jim in Ralph’s place (and of course, there is always the rock that is Johnny as well).

After Ralph exited stage North, we spent the afternoon doing our first official sweep of previously unsearched blue ice field. Despite being out here for just over a week, bad weather and training the newbies had precluded this up until now. Last night Ralph and I spent two hours finding our previous lines from the last ANSMET visit to the Davis-Ward ice fields four years ago (an excursion I was part of). It took some doing, and only about ½ of the poles that I had marked the line with had survived, but in the end we got it marked and ready for today.

For those of you who have never searched for meteorites in Antarctica (and I realize that’s a pretty small club on this Earth), we (try to) comprehensively search every square inch of these blue ice fields. We do this by lining our 8 snowmobiles up in a line, and sweeping across the ice. When we reach the other end of the ice field, we turn around, and sweep back across the ice on a parallel, but not overlapping, track. Now keeping track of where you have searched on largely trackless fields of blue ice is nearly impossible without a visual aid (unless you have super powers like me). So to accommodate the mere mortals, we mark the outside of each sweep with flags, so we have some visual aids as we cross the ~6 km undulating ice surface in these grand sweeps.

Now our last visit here, we only had Ralph for a week, and we didn’t have Johnny (John Schutt, our Mountaineer extraordinaire). Thus are sweep lines last season were less straight, and more curvy. Now, I have come to learn that Johnny is particular about many things, but he is particularly particular about our lines being straight. We realized at the end of last season how curvy our lines had become, and worked very hard to straighten them out, but alas we ran out of time. Instead, we ended up with a reasonably straight line, that had a kink, or dogleg at the end of it. Today we took action to remove that dogleg, by sweeping straight and true under Johnny’s watchful eye (and here we have our second tie to Karate Kid).

We also managed to find 20 meteorites, which is not a bad haul at all (hey, that rhymes…another superpower?), especially in just 4 hours, which brings our total to nearly 80, with about another 20 marked in the field, but not yet collected. I feel a big number year coming on! Hopefully the weather will stay good and we can keep up the good work tomorrow!

Image Caption 1 – A view of the team sweeping across the slightly crevassed blue ice field. The crevasses are the <6 inch elongate white lines where the cracks have been filled in with well packed snow.

Image Caption 2 – A view back to the North(ish) towards camp on our drive home from a long, cold, and exciting day of sweeping.

– written by Ryan Zeigler, Davis-Ward Antarctica, 12/28/14

P.S. Hello to my wife, and I hope that your English classes are going well! How funny is it that now my wife and my mother both teach English though these are admittedly very different things!