College of Arts and Sciences

  The team is together again in McMurdo! Lauren, Alex, Brian, and Johnny arrived this afternoon and took the remainder of camp gear with them. We are enjoying our last night together. Cindy, Nicole, Marc, and I have a long day tomorrow traveling to Christchurch, New Zealand. Lauren and Alex...

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The Basler plane landed successfully at Davis Ward yesterday and Cindy, Nicole, Marc and I are now back in McMurdo. We took 3 of 8 snow machines with us in addition to two tents, the meteorites, and a bunch of other gear. The rest of the team is scheduled...

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We are so good at waiting. From delays getting to Antarctica from New Zealand, then to Davis-Ward from McMurdo, and now back to McMurdo, we are waiting experts. Weather in McMurdo caused the flight this morning to be cancelled, so the schedule should just shift day-by-day until the weather...

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We are finished with meteorite hunting here at Davis Ward and have been packing up camp. A small twin otter plane stopped here this morning to fly about 800 pounds worth of stuff to McMurdo. I, along with Cindy, Nicole and Marc are scheduled to hop on a flight...

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In previous posts, Alex explained how ANSMET serves as a great analog for spaceflight and Nicole discussed relevance of meteorite studies to other planetary missions such as the Apollo exploration of the Moon and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. Another ANSMET connection to NASA exploration is that in...

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In a world where internet is master, it has been quite a change of pace for us to be disconnected for now 5 weeks. Here in the field, we rely on downloaded music, movies, and books (except that downloaded items from streaming services delete after a month without internet...

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There are two ways that humans get rocks from space: (1) Natural delivery of space rocks as meteorites (2) Space rocks directly brought back by space exploration missions known as returned samples. Probably the most famous example of how humans acquired rocks from space is when the Apollo astronauts collected...

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All week we have been riding our snow machines in a line - aka doing sweeps - over the blue ice and finding 20 or so meteorites a day. Johnny is predicting that we have about two days left of sweeps to finish a major blue ice area of...

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Before they were known to be from Mars,  the Martian meteorites were affectionately called the "SNC" meteorites, often pronounced "Snicks".  The name comes from three specimens-  Shergotty, which fell in India in 1865; Nakhla, which fell in Egypt in 1911, and Chassigny, which fell in France in 1815. They...

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Today, we found 25 meteorites! Most of them are similar looking, but a few stand out from the rest. In this blog, I will explain the different types of meteorites that we find in Antarctica, and all over Earth. There are two main types of meteorites, and it’s all...

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