In the reflection of Juliane’s goggles you can see one of the collected meteorites and Barbara taking the picture.

We have reasonably well settled into our adventurous and minimalistic life style here in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica. Today was our 4th full day out here. It is cold here, with air temperatures -8F (-22C), but the wind makes it much much colder. We are starting to settle into a daily routine. We usually get up at 7am, melt ice and snow to have drinking water for the day, have breakfast (I’m still no fan of oatmeal), get dressed in a gazillion layers of clothes: at least 5 top layers including fleece jacket, wind breaker, and lots of heavy wool shirt layers; 4 bottom layers which include a fleece layer, wool layers, and heavy duty ski pants; knee-pads; 2 pair of socks; 4 head layers including 1 balaclavas, 2 neck gaiters, and 1 hat; 2 pair of gloves and mittens; goggles; and of course the ECW gigantic red jacket called “Big Red”. So getting dressed takes about 20min. Inside a tent in which you can’t stand up straight (unless you are Barbara; sometimes being small is an advantage!!). Once dressed we venture outside and tend to our skidoos, warm them up, get food ready for the day (snacks, lunch, hot drinks and hot water), and by 9 am we are on our way to the blue ice fields to search and recover meteorites. Today was our 3rd full day in the field and our meteorite inventory has grown to 46 total now, with some very special specimen among them. We are very excited.
Today started out beautifully, very cold but with almost no wind. We had a great time but in the afternoon Antarctica showed us what quick weather changes mean around here. The beautiful blue and cloudless sky from the morning became almost completely overcast within 2 hours in the afternoon and very light snow was falling. The lighting conditions got so bad that we had to cut our search and recovery operation short by 1 hour today; the light made it almost impossible to distinguish between terrestrial rocks and the meteorites. We are hoping for good weather again for tomorrow but there seems to be. snow front moving towards us which would mean we might get stuck inside the tents tomorrow. We will know when we wake up at 7am to get ready again for the day.
Juliane from Mt Cecily, Antarctica on Dec. 18th at 7pm.