2019 / 2020 Field Season – Page 3 – ANSMET, The Antarctic Search for Meteorites

Preparing for the unknown

January 13, 2020

How do you prepare for the things you don’t know? That’s right - it’s tricky. And it’s one of the fundamental problems of space flight. With projects like the International Space Station (ISS), in 20 years of operation, we have gained a knowledge base that is large enough to...

Blue Ice

January 13, 2020

ANSMET searches for meteorites are always associated with blue ice. Ice is an amazingly transformable substance. If you make it in your freezer at home, it is white and brittle. But if you take a lot of it and stack it up hundreds of feet thick, as a glacier, it...

Tent Days

January 12, 2020

Our Davis Ward camp site has endured two days in a row of bad weather - 30 mile per hour wind, blowing snow, and overcast skies. These conditions make it extremely difficult to search for meteorites (we need the sun to better illuminate the shiny fusion crust on meteorite...

Unexpected Bounty

January 9, 2020

The beginning of 2020 brought great weather for meteorite hunting to the Davis Ward ANSMET field camp. For the past 6 days, the skies have been clear, the temperatures mild (-5 to 5 degrees F) and the winds light, giving us the opportunity to engage in systematic searches on...

MeteorWRONGS

January 7, 2020

Boy am I good at finding “meteorWRONGS”. These are boring old Earth rocks (sorry geologists...) that look like meteorites. We identify meteorites based on their black color, glassy shiny surface (fusion crust that formed when they entered Earth’s atmosphere), and rounded shape. Common meteorwrongs we find around Davis Ward...

Biggest Meteorite Yet!

January 6, 2020

We’ve had two more successful days out hunting for meteorites; our total count is now up to 114! Systematically searching a blue ice field by snow machine is great fun because we come across lots of larger meteorites. Pictured here is our largest yet found, estimated to be about...

Two Full Days of Hunting

January 4, 2020

Good news! Wind has blown away most of the snow sitting on the ice; now we can spot meteorites! Unfortunately, the wind has also brought the cold. Everyone on the team managed to stay warm and happy (except for Lauren’s left foot) in about -10 to 0 degree F...

Walking Through Earth’s History

January 2, 2020

It has been snowing here in the Davis-Ward Nunataks area! Even just a light coating makes identifying meteorites against a background of thousands of terrestrial pebbles almost impossible. But this is Antarctica so the winds will pick up and blow the snow away. Until then we are busying ourselves...

New Year, New Meteorites

January 1, 2020

Happy New Year! The ANSMET team is so happy to be in Davis Ward for the start of 2020. Here in Antarctica, we were among the first in the world to experience the new year and we witnessed a midnight Sun (pictured above)! We have had a productive few...

Where’s the Ice!

January 1, 2020

Over the past few days, it has been snowing in the Davis Ward region. The beautiful glittering ice crystals floating gracefully past us, though, eventually fall and cover rocks laying on the ground. This is a big problem for us, because it is very difficult to look for meteorites...

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