The rainbow colored ANSMET team 2017-2018. From left to right: Brian, Barbara, Juliane, Ralph, Ioannis, Scott, John, Jim, James.
One week has now passed since our ANSMET Boot Camp. In three weeks from today we will embark on our fantastic trip to the cold continent to recover meteorites.
Here is who we are:
Our fearless leaders: Ralph Harvey (Professor at Case Western Reserve University) and Jim Karner (Professor at the University of Utah). This year Ralph will not join us in the field instead he will help to keep us out of trouble from Cleveland.
Our even more fearless mountaineers: John Schutt and Brian Rougeux. John has been on ANSMET for a really long time, Brian has been with ANSMET a good amount of time as well, and both of them are really cool! Their job is to keep us safe and sound and as far as I have heard, they are extremely good at it.
Then we have our veterans: Barbara Cohen (civil servant at NASA Goddard) and James Day (Professor at Scripps). Barbara has been in the field with ANSMET three times already, this will be her 4th time. I’m very lucky to share the tent with her! And this is James’ second time in the field with ANSMET.
And last but not least there is us, the newbies. Three total this year, all from 3 different, international countries: Scott VanBommel (Canadian; PostDoc at University of Guelph Canada); Ioannis Baziotis (Greeke; Professor at University of Athens, Greece) and me, Juliane Gross (German; Professor at Rutgers State University of New Jersey, USA). We are all so very excited to go to Antarctica for the first time and to be part of the ANSMET family.
This year our team will be split into two smaller teams of 4 people. Team A, also called “Team Awesome” or “Team Amazeballs”; and Team B also called “THE Team” or “Team Brilliant”.
Team Awesome is composed of Brian, Barbara, Juliane, and Jim. We will head out to Mt. Cecily, Emily, and Raymond and are going to hunt down and recover ALL THE meteorites!
Team Brilliant is composed of John, James, Scott, and Ioannis. They will head out to the Amundsen glacier to do reconnaissance; scouting out new icefields to boldly go where no man has gone before.
The past weekend we all met for the first time at the new ANSMET Boot Camp. The trip started off on a Thursday with a bit of trouble: we all experienced a serious travel-delay-bug trying to get to Cleveland with planes being delayed forever and ever. But hopefully that means we got it out of our system now so we won’t have to deal with it during our deployment to the cold continent (one can dream after all!). On Friday, after we finally made it, Barbara, Juliane, James, Scott, and Ioannis gave short presentations at Case Western for an ANSMET symposium and then we all headed out to the “Pink Pig” farm for our Boot Camp bonding experience.
During the Boot Camp we got a first glimpse what the next few months will have in store for us. We all slept together in the same room/area, mostly on the floor in our sleeping bags. This experience included pee-bottles and loud sleeping noises (I’m looking at you, Jim) that required ear-plugs for some of us in the end.
During the next days we learned and talked about gear, experienced how the Michelin Man must feel in his puffy clothes, ate typical lunch food we will have in the field (meaning frozen granola bars fresh out of the freezer, meat sticks, and pringles). We cooked a typical in-the-deep-field stew-like dish for dinner comprised of all frozen goods (chicken, veggies, pasta, and lots and lots of pepper). We learned about high-altitude sickness, memorized John’s rules about how to not die and how to be nice to each other (he has A LOT of rule #1s), and we learned how to set up a tent in windy conditions (simulated by John puffing while Jim and Ralph demonstrated putting up the tent). Scott and Ioannis also got the firsthand experience how cozy it is in there when they slept in the tent during the last night. We learned how to stand/kneel on a skidoo to drive while being hyper aware of your surroundings, and we took a very close look at our prospect field sites from satellite images.
“Birthing the newbies” (the entrance/exit of the tent). From left to right: Juliane, Scott, Ioannis.
Admittedly, there were times us newbies were a bit wide-eyed but overall we are glad that we got a pretty good idea about what we are getting ourselves into and are more pumped (and prepared) about our new upcoming adventure than ever. It will be cold and white and bright, with 24 hours of sunlight, with frozen granola bars and meat sticks for lunch, with no showers, and sleeping in little 2-people tents for 6-7 weeks in on the ice in the middle of nowhere in total isolation. And we can’t wait to go!
So why in the world are we doing this you might ask, what is in for us? The answer is simple: life experience, adventure, and the privilege to work side by side with amazing people/scientists to recover meteorites that no-one has ever seen before, in a very remote region on our planet that very few people have ever set foot on. We don’t get to keep the meteorites and we don’t get preferential treatment when it comes to requesting the rocks for research either. We simply do it for the greater good of the Planetary Sciences community. Cheesy but true 🙂
We are all looking forward to the amazing experience and the wonderful time we will have with each other in the field. And we are excited to share our stories with each of you in this blog. So stay tuned, more is coming.
-Juliane from Highland Park NJ, Sunday 5 Nov 2017 at 8:30pm
A few additions from RPH: This is John’s 37th season!?! Note in the first pic we tried to arrange by spectral class, but John as usual defied classification. And many thanks to the staff of Case’s Squire Valleevue Farm for letting us use the Pink Pig for the weekend.