College of Arts and Sciences

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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Today was a happy, meteorite-filled day at Davis Ward. The team found 17 space rocks, including what we think are two carbonaceous chondrites. These meteorites are among the coolest rocks in the solar system because they contain some of the first solids formed in the solar system. They likely originate...

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  Two messages were delivered to me from the field this afternoon- one in the form of an email from Robert Citron (via his sister Amy) and one more directly via voice from Jim Karner.   Let's start with Robert:  Greetings from the ANSMET Davis-Ward field camp! A lot happened the...

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Hi Everyone, I can neither confirm nor deny that the last two field party members made it into the field today-  but as yesterday's post declared,  no news should be presumed good news. I've got something else to share. Probably almost every reader of the ANSMET blog knows that in almost...

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Hi Everyone, Welcome to a "no news is good news" edition of the ANSMET blog.  Yesterday our second Basler flight went from McMurdo to Davis-Ward, delivering Erin, Robert and Lauren and a bunch of gear. I got several third-hand reports (from Jim and field team family members) that it all...

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The ANSMET team remains split between the Davis Ward field site and McMurdo Station. The skeleton crew who has successfully made it to the field (Daniela, Minako, and Brian) is currently searching for meteorites on foot and are flagging specimens as they go. Today they found 13 new meteorites out...

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Yesterday was an incredible day, as Minako and Daniela successfully took off on a Basler flight to the Davis Ward field site. We received a call from Brian at 7 pm (yesterday) confirming their safe arrival and expressing their excitement - asserting they were "jumping off the walls"! The...

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DANIELA AND MINAKO ARE ACTIVATED WITH THREE EXCLAMATION POINTS❗❗❗ woohoo from Erin.... Additional note from Ralph:  if the crew's duty day is long enough we might get lucky and get a couple of flights in.  The DW round trip is about a half day.   Everybody send your woohoos and other positive...

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Just like the movie Groundhog Day, we woke up (again) to the news that our team would not be flying today. The weather at McMurdo looks great, but there was a higher priority mission that needed the Basler to pull out a team working at the Kamb Ice Stream...

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