Here’s where we stood just after lunch. The image doesn’t have the resolution to show it properly, but the flags are dense all the way to the edge of the image in the moraine.
I don’t remember why Jim decided he needed to chip this flag out, but I’m sure it made sense at the time. Still, that’s some serious skill. No comment about scales in this image.
This was taken at the same time as the previous picture. These are the meteorites we had collected over the previous few hours. Again, this was the approximate density of the meteorites throughout that whole moraine. Every time we collected a meteorite, it seemed like someone would find another one (or another 5).
Did you ever wonder what 108 meteorites in a back-pack looked like (I’m sure the Miller range crew is curious)? Now you know. Don’t forget we had another 64 in the other collection kit.
Our salvation…the groomer. You know it’s robust because it survived grooming all of us (even Johnny) as well!
I know yesterday I said I was going to write about why we collect meteorites today. I lied. Turns out I do that kind of a lot. To be fair, I do have a pretty good excuse (this time), namely that I’m tired and it is late. Also, the sciency bits of why we collect meteorites can be a little boring (which is sort of like saying CSPAN is a “little bit” boring). Never fear, the boring parts will be attended to later. For now, I’d like to spend a little bit more time talking about why we’re so Hard Core Awesome (i.e., Harcawesome; last time I am defining it…pay attention people).
Now, being tired may seem contradictory for one who is Harcawesome (and yes, it should ALWAYS be capitalized), but when you collected 172 meteorites in one day, even Harcawesome people have earned the right to be a little fatigued. Oh, you read that number right. 1-7-2…in one day…from 9:00 till 5:30 (not counting lunch and commute time). Let that sink in for a second. We worked for 480 minutes today, which means we collected (praise excel) over 20 meteorites per hour, or one every 3 minutes (I’ll wait while the geologists in the audience take off their shoes and socks to check my math; geophysicists have 60 minutes to write a short program to check our math, though I imagine you’ll need another 3 hours to debug it). Since each GPS record takes 2.5 minutes to register, we worked at nearly maximum capacity.
But wait, it’s so much better than that.
What would you like to do after 9 hours of hard work…yes, sort through 172 meteorites, that’s what I said too! Jim on the left for scale.
As you’ll have noticed in yesterday’s blog, we found about 62 meteorites (in two hours) that we left flagged but uncollected. We collected those before lunch with 5 people. In the meantime, the other 3 people started searching for new meteorites. Not long after lunch, we sent a team of two people back to camp to start grooming the runway (more on that later), and then the rest of us collected/searched simultaneously in the moraine we are tentatively calling meteorite beach. So the final numbers on the day are 172 meteorites collected in a single day, 110 meteorites found and collected in a single day, and 119 meteorites found in a single day (we found but didn’t collect 9).
Near as we can tell, the previous record for most meteorites collected in a day was 105 at Roberts Massif in 2004 and a close second was 100 at Miller Range in 2010. Aren’t those nice cute numbers? I mean, I’d particularly like to thank the 2010 team (Hosie, Lindsay, Marc, Vera, Neyda) for making a valiant effort (even if ½ your samples that day were flakes of carbonaceous chondrite fusion crust), and hopefully next time you’re down in Antarctica, you’ll be able to put up a grownup number. We didn’t annihilate the existing record so much as we obliterated it. In fact, we just got a text message on our phone from Mac Ops who informed us that pieces of the old record just damaged some buildings at WAIS divide camp in West Antarctica. We actually feel a little bad about that (okay, Jim feels bad, I’m still too busy doing the victory dance).
To quote the noble sage Barney Stinson, “it was Legen…wait for…Dary”.
In news other than how awesome we are, it turns out we’re on for a Basler pull out. It simply means we get to take 3 Basler (which is Canadian for DC-3) flights directly back to McMurdo rather than 9 twin otter flights to CTAM, followed by a pair of C-130 flights to McMurdo. The only draw back to this is that the Basler is a tail dragger, so we need to create — or groom — a ~2000’ runway for them to land on (that’s 2/5’s of a mile, or ~6 football fields including the end zones). Grooming a runway means you slowly drive up and down the runway dragging a heavy snow groomer, which gradually wears down the 2-3’ sasgrugi and bumps on the runway (and fills in the low spots). Near as we can tell, it will take 12-18 hours to prepare the runway, in fact I can hear someone (likely Devon) out there grooming at 9:30 PM.
Otherwise, we’ve got about 2 ½ days of collecting left, then ½ a day of prep to start pulling out, then 3 days to get everyone back to McMurdo. You know, assuming everything goes exactly to plan. Course, this is Antarctica so what are the chances of anything going wrong? Exactly. We’ve got 541 meteorites collected, and I’ll be disappointed with anything less than 600! Stay tuned for future installments of the “Ryan thinks he is funny blog.”
Lesson Learned 1: Don’t try to fill the water pot with ice directly from a 5 gallon bucket! No matter how good of an idea it seems, it’s not. On an unrelated note, our stove is now very clean, as is the tent floor, and large portions of our Thermarests.
Lesson Learned 2: When the water pot is boiling, it is REALLY hot. Always.
Lesson Learned 3: Collecting 172 meteorites in a single day is tiring! You know you’re tired when choice between closing door (means getting up) or just turning both burners on full isn’t really a choice.
– Ryan, Davis-Ward, Friday January 16, 2015
P.S. Hello to my beautiful wife! I’m sitting her drinking my hot cider out of the most wonderful coffee mug. Everyone is so jealous of my mug!