THIS PICTURE (and the others in this post) IS 100% FAKE and has nothing to do with the narrative that follows. It’s basically click-bait to amuse you during a very text-heavy post. I had a chance to play with an AI image generator and asked it to show me “the wreck of a UFO in an Antarctic landscape”. I thought I’d share some of the more amusing images.
The 2023-2024 ANSMET field season is quickly winding down. As a result I’ve been playing the “ANSMET leadership at home” role in a lot of detailed conversations with Jim Karner in the field, with cargo and planners in McMurdo, with the Antarctic meteorite curators at the Smithsonian and the Johnson Space Center, with our program manager and even with the USAP officer who signs off on our sample handling plans. My goals is to describe how we’ll try to wrap up this year’s field work over the next 10 days and the challenges we’ll face to best meet the needs of the planetary science community. The resulting rather long-winded post is an attempt to fill in some of those details; if details aren’t your thing you may want to stop reading now (even if the pictures are awesome).
As frequent readers of this blog are aware, our pre-season plans were to finish up at Davis-Ward and then with a week or two left move camp to the main icefield of the Dominion Range, about 30 km away. That was an important goal for us- it would have been a final reconnaissance step, helping us understand whether it’s a place to go for one season, a partial-season or even many seasons over multiple years. Unfortunately that trip isn’t going to happen; the delays at the beginning of the season ate away too much time and finishing up at Davis-Ward is the best we can hope for. The good news is that we will meet that goal; after 8 seasons of recon visits and full-blown methodical systematic searching of the blue ice and surrounding moraines, our work at Davis Ward will be done. Will we get every single specimen? Probably not; the snow cover shifts around a lot, and even with overlapping transects and multiple passes through moraines there’s going to be some specimens hiding somewhere. But every major or even minor piece of accessible blue ice has been scoured and every moraine has been thoroughly “plowed” by the eyes of ANSMET field party members. We’ve clearly gotten to the point where the economics of scarce logistics suggest we move on from Davis-Ward, declaring it “done” for now (if not forever).
THIS IS ALSO NOT A REAL IMAGE. Again, all of the images in this post are 100% FAKE, generated by an AI program I asked to show me a crashed flying saucer in Antarctica. I can tell you one thing- if we found something like that I would be calling everybody I know immediately….
But where next? That’s an interesting question strongly connected to the end of the current season. With aircraft time the rarest of commodities, it makes a ton of sense for us to create caches of equipment in the field at our next site if possible, rather than flying everything back to McMurdo only to shift it again next November. It saves days of flight time and hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel. But having missed that reconnaissance goal, we’re leery about fully committing to the Dominion Range for next season- given the struggles Polar Programs faces to support deep field work, it might make sense for us to aim at other targets easier to reach from McMurdo. We already know those air support shortcomings make travel impossible to more distant targets that we really want to visit again, like Graves Nunataks or LaPaz, and we’re not afraid to try and make USAP’s life easier if it’ll help us get into the field.
Jim and Brian are in charge now, so it’s their decision to make, and I know they’re talking about this 20 times a day. John and I share our opinions and advice with them whenever they call. All of us are spending quite a bit of time gazing at tea leaves, entrails and/or our navels and anything else that might help them predict the future (and listen, my navel is barely visible to me nowadays).
Another end of season challenge we’re facing is new (mostly); there’s been some changes to the timing of end-of-season shipping that are challenging our ability to get the meteorites home this season! This has been my high-priority task for about two weeks; so far we’ve worked out at least a partial solution. The problem originates with two conflicting schedule changes. First, way back in May OPP asked us to start and end our field season about a week later than we’ve ever planned to in the past. Generally we try to get into the field at the end of the first week of December, and leave the field around the 3rd week of January (today, in fact, would be our normal target date). But their request came with a carrot, allowing us to stay in the field until the last days of January, which we were generally fine with, because late January often has some of the nicest weather you’ll ever see on the plateau. So we didn’t have an immediate problem accepting the “later start / later finish” option.
I’ll say it a third time- THIS IS NOT A REAL IMAGE, this is 100% fake and generated by an AI graphics program prompted to show me a crashed flying saucer in Antarctica. Frankly this looks more like a 1960’s airport restaurant. Really, you can fly between the stars but you still use plate-glass windows? C’mon.
What we didn’t know however is that the ship that brings cargo into (and out of) McMurdo was, for the first time in our experience, showing up several weeks early. Usually the ship arrives in the latest part of January, and what follows is frantic unloading and reloading that stretches into (and sometimes beyond) mid-February. This year, however, the ship is already almost there; the icebreaker is fine-tuning the channel for its arrival as I write this. Loading is due to close next Friday, January 26th- four or five days BEFORE the ANSMET team is scheduled to get out of the field.
That’s a problem, because the only way we can ship the meteorites home while also keeping them completely secure and deep-frozen is on that ship; our sample handling plan legally requires they be kept at or below -20° F. On our pull-out flights, we travel with the meteorites in locked coolers and the plane’s cargo deck is kept cold; and on our landing we immediately handed off custody to the trustworthy Science Cargo personnel, who then hustle the coolers into a locked freezer container, which later is loaded onto the cargo vessel. This year? The ship might already be out in McMurdo Sound, sailing northward, when ANSMET makes it out of the field.
Fortunately we’ve got at least a partial solution- SOME of the meteorites will come out of the field this weekend, on a scheduled resupply flight to our Davis-Ward camp. As in the past the Science Cargo folks will meet the plane when it returns to McMurdo and make sure the samples get on the ship. But the rest? They stay with the team in the field, and no other flights are scheduled before pull-out. If the late-season meteorites can’t make the ship there’s really no option but to leave them securely locked in coolers in McMurdo until the next ship leaves (presumably in 2025).
It’s still possible that the remaining meteorites will get on the ship, of course. Delays are par for the course in Antarctica, and if the ship departure is delayed even a few days and the ANSMET team pull-out remains on time, all of the 2023-2024 samples (rather than most of them) could get back to Houston in a few months. Jim is also considering a staged pull-out, similar to the put-in. Since it takes several days to fly everything and everybody back to McMurdo anyway, it’s possible they’ll choose to have the first plane fly just a little earlier that originally planned, in the hopes of getting our precious little rocks onto the ship. But all of this is utter speculation for now; planning for some events to be conveniently delayed while others are not is folly, and planning for anything in Antarctica to happen ahead of schedule is…… well, let’s just say I hope you’ll share whatever you’re drinking.
Which leaves me to share this final thought with you. I know as scientists we shouldn’t be superstitious, and I would never pray for some event in Antarctica to be delayed (the Ice Lords will almost certainly grant that wish in ways we will not like). Instead, I trust that the team (including ANSMET, the flight crews, the planners, the fixed-wing ops people, and the Science Cargo folks in McMurdo) will do their best for us and sieze every opportunity to make things work. So much of what ANSMET accomplishes is due to teams of people working together, making amazing things happen with limited resources, in unfavorable conditions and with shifting timelines. History suggests we can and should trust that the results will be the best we could have hoped for in any case.
And if any of those images show up on some UFO-loving website I will immediately blame AI for making the images possible.
-Ralph in very snowy Novelty OH.