College of Arts and Sciences

The sheer amounts of snow—and how much it drifts and buries everything in its path. The dynamism and massive scale of the landscape. How quickly we developed familiar routines. The joys and comforts of a tent-home cooked meal. The way anything adhesive predictably fails to stick in the driest,...

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A quick programmatic note here-  as of late yesterday the field team is back in McMurdo!   Along with them came SIX pre-prepared blogs that I'll be posting today.    The field team tried to send me these blogs by "Otternet";  asking the pilots to deliver a thumb drive...

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Hi Everyone, I haven't heard directly from the field party in several days,  but I'm not worried about them;  contacts in McMurdo relay that all is well and that the mid-season (more like 5/6th of the season) resupply visit by a Twin Otter took place two days ago. In addition to...

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A short post today where I beg our reader's forgiveness for the lack of posts from the field lately. The field team called me yesterday (lunch time at Davis Ward) and confessed they ran out of minutes for their Iridium satellite modem a few days ago.  They're putting a...

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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...

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The team awoke at Davis Ward to cloudy skies. You can tell when it is cloudy before even stepping outside your tent because the light hitting the tent is diffuse instead of much stronger on the Sun side. Cloudy weather makes for bad meteorite searching conditions because one of...

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  Today, despite colder and windier weather than yesterday, we completed the systematic searching of the big ice tongue! We are very excited about this because it is the culmination of over three seasons of fieldwork, and it is an honor to be a part of it. We also had...

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Today was a fantastic day for the ANSMET Team :) We awoke to bright blue, cloudless skies without a whisper of wind (which was quite relieving after 30 mph gusts confined us to our tents yesterday morning). It was a perfect day to hunt for meteorites! We left camp with the...

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After several days of beautiful weather and productive meteorite collecting, the wind finally caught up to us. It was an impressive scene, with blowing snow and sastrugi (wave-like structures formed by wind sculpting of the snow surface) stretching across our campsite like the tentacles of a kraken. The wind...

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Several of us woke up around 3 am this morning with gusting wind hitting our tents. Yes, Antarctica turned. From a beautiful no wind day yesterday to a windy day today, just like that. We started our day appropriately--heading out to the “wind rows” to collect meteorites we found on...

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