Marianne Mader, Systematic Team, Jan. 16, 2012 Otway Camp, Beardmore Region, Antarctica

We’re now at the Otway campsite, our final Antarctic home in the field and location of the ‘landing strip’ (i.e., flat snow surface) for the C-130 Hercules plane. It took us three attempts, but we finally managed to leave the Larkman campsite yesterday! We had originally planned to go to a third field site, near Cecily-Raymond Nunataks, however, we were turned back by weather and a medical situation. We’re happy to say that Shaun Norman, who was flown out of camp on a twin otter three days ago, is doing well and is in good health.

Overall, the moraines and blue ice near the Larkman Nunatak proved fruitful – we’re confident in the thoroughness of our meteorite collection and the site is now considered complete – no future ANSMET teams will visit this site again! Our meteorite hunting work for the 2012-13 season is officially over and we’re now waiting for flights back to McMurdo. We’ll need two C-130 flights to get us, our 329 meteorites, and all our gear back there. Yesterday, we took down our entire camp in record time (only three hours) and then, with two sleds trailing behind each snowmobile, we drove 34 miles to Otway – again in record time – only four hours! We had smooth snow all the way (see photo of some of our packed gear with Larkman Nunatak in the background). Our new camp was set-up by 6pm.

Today we packed up all our gear that is not essential for daily life onto cargo pallets. We also heard great news from McMurdo – our first flight is scheduled for tomorrow (Jan 17) evening! Four of us – Tom, Stan, Mini, and I – will leave with half our gear on that flight (provided the weather cooperates)! Jim, Andrew, and Rob will leave on the second flight, which is yet to be scheduled. Fingers crossed – hopefully our next blog post will be from McMurdo!!

Tomoko Arai, Recon Team, 16th January, 2013, Szabo Bluff

Hi! Ten days have passed since we were tent-bound on Jan 7th. The weather has never been good except afternoon in Jan 12th. Strong wind, low surface definition, and snow mounds around the tents, have made it hard for us to go to the poo tent or ice chipping sites, which are just 15-20 m away from our tent. A few days ago, I slipped down one of the snow mounds on the way to the poo tent, because I could barely see the snow surface topography. To avoid the slippery accident, I started to use an ice axe as a walking stick whenever I need to go out. As we are stuck in the tent with not a lot to do, eating is the most fun and fundamental activity. The picture shows a chef Katie cooking Halibut (white fish) with garlic and a variety of herbs. She is an excellent cook and we have very much enjoyed a wide variety of delicious dinner everyday. The dinner menu so far has included; coconut shrimp curry, Spaghetti Bolognese, beef steak with a garlic herb gravy, salmon teriyaki, sausage casserole, garlic shrimp, chilli con carni, sweet & sour chicken, beef-beacon-cheese burger, and so on. Now you probably start to feel you mouth watering (^0^) Last night, Katie and I discussed how much food was left in the food box, and confirmed that we could make it by comfortable for another two weeks or so before we have to switch to a cup-a-soup diet. I will share all the dinner menu of the season with you, once we can get out here hopefully by the end of the Antarctic summer.

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Katie Joy, Recon Team, 14th January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Guess what – we have moved and are currently enjoying a nice glass of red wine back in McMurdo. We are sitting in comfy chairs with cushions, and have had showers and washed our hair. No only kidding. We are still sitting in the field at Szabo Bluff in the Transantarctic Mountains. We have been in the tent 8 days now as the Twin Otter plane still has not had good enough weather to come and retrieve us. Still not as bad as the Antarctic explorers of 100 years or so ago who often had to wait a couple of years for the weather to be good enough for the boat to return them to sunnier climates… Always look on the bright side of life. The weather has been seriously odd – all day yesterday the clouds were thick and winds were really high and blowing snow (see photo), and we only had one to two mile visibility. Sometime in the night the winds just dropped completely and an eerie silence took over, but clouds still cover the sky meaning that we have little surface definition. This means it is too dangerous for the plane to come out, or for us to get out and try and do a bit more meteorite hunting. Even walking around outside is tricky as you can’t see shadows properly, and so tend to not see quite steep slopes on the snow drifts that are now lying between the tents – a few times now I have been strolling around only to suddenly find myself sliding down a slope on my rear end wondering where the ground went. Ah well.

We have had some moments of good weather to be able to clear up camp a bit, and get organised for the move whenever it might take place… hum… Even Priscilla the penguin joined in helping us empty some of the food boxes (which mainly involved her eating as much as she could to help lighten the load…). We are now out of chicken patties much to Priscilla’s disgust, and Tomoko and I only have one more can of Pringles left, and John and Joe are reaching critically low cookie levels – I think the food bartering between tents is going to start any time soon…

Hope you are all well and the weather in your part of the world is treating you well

Tomoko Arai, 12th January, 2013, Szabo Bluff

Hello, everyone! I hope everything is going well. Inconceivably, we have been tent-bound for six days! We originally planned to move to a different campsite prior to heading back to the Klein glacier, where we landed and stayed for several days in the beginning of the season. However, we are now forced to change the plan and going straight back to the Klein ready for departure back to McMurdo station. Every morning we were told that a Twin Otter flight has been cancelled due to the bad weather. We could not even go out to meteorite search because the low surface definition due to the overcast sky and/or high winds. All we could do each day is just stay in the tent , being ready for move, and praying for a perfect weather in the next day morning, because our fate solely depends on the weather. The weather out here changes quickly and appears to be never stable even for an hour. We can only get out of here, only if both the weather and the weather forecast are good-to-go for a Twin Otter flight to come and get us. Both requirements are hard to fulfill, when the extremely variable weather here is considered. Anyway, we are hoping to move to the Klein glacier anytime soon, though we are not sure how many more days of meteorite hunting we will be able to do.

The picture shows a rainbow like ring around the sun, where the sun light is refracted by ice crystals high in the sky.

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Andrew Beck, January 13th, 2013, Larkman Nunatak, G-058

As my tentmate Jim put it, “the last few days have been like a scene out of the movie Groundhog Day”. Yesterday, January 12th, we broke camp at Larkman Nunatak for the second time and tried to make our way to Mt. Cecily, our third field site. However, like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, we experienced deja vu and were turned back again, primarily for weather related reasons. We then came back to Larkman and made camp about 100 yards upwind from our campsite of the previous month. Today we had another bad weather day and at this point it is unlikely that we will have time to go to Mt. Cecily, our next move instead being to Otway Massif where we will be taken out of the field later this week.

As I write this on the evening of the 13th the winds are howling outside the tent at 20 knots and air temperature is hovering around -20 C. The weather has been like this for the better part of the day, starting somewhere mid-morning. While the weather has prevented any travel today, it did allow us the chance to discuss logistics for our upcoming ~30 mile trip to Otway. Tomorrow we plan to dig out the snow from today (my sled is half buried after 8hrs!), assess weight distribution among all the sleds, and discuss our travel plans with McMurdo. The bad weather day didn’t mean all work though; Jim, Rob and I had some fun playing card games in our tent this afternoon (thanks for the cards Tina!).

If our travel plans hold up that means the next blog post may be from Otway, the location where the season began six weeks ago and the location where we will leave the field in about the same number of days. Since most of today was spent in tents, I don’t really have a picture that sums up the goings on around camp today, so instead I chose picture that sums up the mood. The picture in this blog is a panorama of the camp at Larkman with Marianne ski-doing off into the “sunset” after a hard days work, or about as good as a “sunset” as you get when the sun is out 24 hrs a day. We are on the homestretch now and I think everyone is feeling a little bittersweet about ending up the season, but excited to get back home. Here is hoping the weather clears up and we can all go riding off into the sunset to Otway to conclude a wonderful year.

 

Rob Coker, Larkman Nunatak, January 10, 2013 (G-058)

[start transmission]

I warned them. I warned them not to go. I warned them not to go to the old camp. I had heard stories about the members of that expedition (Linda most especially) that gave me chills: they came back from the ice changed, unwilling or unable to talk about their experiences on the plateau. But of course my campmates didn’t listen to me, since I’m just the fingie of the group, so they just laughed at me and off we went. That fateful day started off nicely enough, with a snowmobile ride up over the pass through Larkman Nunatak. On the other side, we explored the blue ice bordering the crevasse-filled pressure ridges. We were properly prepared and trained and warned concerning falling into any crevasses, but nothing was said about any Thing coming out of them.

Before I go any further, in case some Thing happens to me, what I say here is a full and true account of events, no matter what others — or I — may say later.

After searching for a few hours, we approached some old bamboo poles, with the rotting remains of flags flapping from them in the cold wind; these marked the scarred site of the old camp. Ostensibly, we were going to clean up the detritus that inevitably gets left behind in a field camp, no matter how careful one tries to be. As we edged into the site, the broken poles and oddly disturbing reddish brown patches of snow and ice filled me with foreboding and a nameless anxiety and even, inexplicably, fear. Mysterious serpentine undulations, pointing back towards the pressure ridges, were visible throughout the dismal place; wind-carved features, I was assured. While I was attempting to extract the remnants of one such pole from the uncannily strong grip of the ice, I heard cries — quickly stilled — from some of my companions. I rushed over to Mini and saw she was smiling very broadly — almost inanely — no, insanely — and holding this…this green Thing, that she had removed from the ice. When asked how she had found such a small object in this vast wasteland, she would only rather distantly reply “It was just there.” Soon, after, she put on her full goggle mask — I haven’t seen her face since this picture was taken — while almost proudly displaying her new “companion”. They have become inseparable.

When we got back to our camp — with Mini speeding along ahead, eager to return to our abode on the ice for some fiendish reason — Mini and Marianne promptly sequestered themselves in their tent, not to be seen until the next day. The next morning, they were particularly impatient to begin searching; they seemed very focused on finding one certain type of Star Stone: carbonaceous, which bear amino acids, the building blocks of life. Even if I had made the connection then, I’m not sure what I could have done to stop the inevitable! While searching that day, Marianne lagged behind the rest of us, following an odd zig-zag pattern, until she stopped and excitedly waved Mini over to her. Luckily — ha! — we all went over to see the strange ominous blackened lump that Marianne was almost reverently packing away. At camp, in celebration of their eldritch achievement, I suppose, “the girls” — such an innocuous label considering what I know they have now become! — invited Shaun and Tom over for dinner. The latter have been moody and withdrawn ever since. The next morning — yesterday — Shaun spent hours alone with Stan, nominally fixing Stan’s skidoo. I should have realized two skilled men such as they shouldn’t have needed that long for a simple repair! Now Stan, my tentmate, is different somehow — subdued maybe — but suddenly he is very eager to return to “civilization” (which he says with an oddly condescending and seemingly hungry tone). The other four have been saying similar things and are getting increasingly visibly frustrated at the weather-induced delays for our resupply, which may result in our staying here longer than planned.

Last night I played cards with Andrew and Jim, the remaining members of the team. They appeared and behaved normal enough. However, they are even now having dinner with “the girls”, so I fear that I am the last. As the Frackin New Guy, I guess I wasn’t thought to be important enough to…to subvert, to change, or whatever that Thing has done, but I’m sure it will happen soon. I almost hope the storms come and bury us and our camp, never to be found, before the planes arrive, before they take these unknown Rocks and Things back to an unexpecting and unsuspecting civilization. Oh the horrible Truths that will be learned!

One final note of warning (and as I write this I sense them quietly gathering outside my tent, so I must hurry up and finish): at the old eldritch camp was a long odious piece of rope attached to something buried deep in the ice, some unspeakable Thing I’m sure the previous expedition found, perhaps in the deep crevasses of the pressure ridges. We tried to free it, but we

Katie Joy, Recon Team, 10th January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Well, regrettably there is not a lot of meteorite action to report from Szabo Bluff. For the last four days we have been tent bound waiting for the opportunity to change camp. We have two days where the wind blew and the noise was incredible, and then it just stopped to be replaced by a weather system from the north that has brought cloudy skies, warmth, fog – and today – quite a bit of snow. It is eerily quiet outside, the flags aren’t flapping and we can barely see the hills around. The only sounds come from when somebody is walking around crunching snow underfoot, and Tomoko and I can hear John and Joe chuckling from the tent next door. Occasionally someone ventures outside to chip ice that we use to make water (see photo of Joe hard at work), to visit the loo, or just to check out what the weather is up to and admire the rainbow ring that forms around the Sun when the air is thick with ice crystals, and have a wander around camp to stretch their legs. But mostly we are still just playing the waiting game and hoping that the weather will change.

A could of notable strange events to report along with the eerie weather… my PC suddenly came back to life today… total surprise… I had been trying to randomly plug it and turn it on for the past three weeks and today it picked to revive itself. A minor miracle in this dirge of bad weather – I can only assume that it dislikes the cold and the warm weather has revived it. Also we had a strange visitor in camp a couple of days ago – a mischievous penguin with a natty red bowtie who calls herself Priscilla, and who we found helping herself to the chicken patties from our foodbox. She even tried to steal the giant pepperoni John and Joe have been saving for an emergency food day (see photo of her caught in the act). The cheek. She claims to have stared in all sorts of movies including ‘March of the Penguins’ and having inspired ‘Happy Feet’, ‘Pingu’ and even the penguin heroes of ‘Madagascar’. Sounds like a lot of delusional nonsense to us… but anyway, we are hoping she might come in use to help us sniff out those pesky meteorites when we can move camp. In the mean time she has been busy eating the rest of our chicken patties (see photo), helping us dig up the tent stakes which have become drifted in from all the snow, and generally keeping us entertained.

If everyone could please send us good thoughts that the weather will improve we would appreciate it. Thanks

Priscilla King, Recon Team, 8th January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Well hello there darlings. I am my holiday from the Ross Sea (really the leopard seals are a nightmare this time of year) and upon my hike through the mountains I stumbled across the ANSMET recon team camp. Well you can imagine my surprise – what are these crazy humans doing out here searching for rocks from space… hum… strange bunch (and between you and me they appear rather unwashed) but they have agreed to pay me in salmon steaks and chicken patties if I hang around for a few days to help them out. I do like chicken patties (especially with ketchup) so I have agreed, and they have found me a cosy orange tent to set up home in and stretch out my tired feet. It even has a scented candle, and a chair with a big blue comfy cushion with a hole in it for me to put my tail through whilst I paint my nails.

The humans seem a bit fed up as they have been stuck in their tents for the past two days… yesterday apparently the winds were blowing at 35 knots and today, although the winds are low, the clouds are thick and threatening snow. I don’t know… seems like pretty normal Antarctic weather for penguins like me, but apparently they need low winds and blue skies to move camp. I hope that things clear up for them so we can get on with looking for these rocks they are after.

Ta-ra for now

Monday, Jan. 7 Tom Sharp, Systematic Search Team G-058

We are nearly done with our tasks and Larkman Nunatak and it is time to clean up before we depart for our next camp at Cecily-Raymond Nunatak. We have completed the systematic search of all the blue ice in the area and we have searched nearly all of the moraines. Whenever we find a meteorite, we mark it’s location with either a flag. These flags stay up until we confirm the GPS locations of all the finds. Now it is time to clean up the flags. We spent the morning pulling flags from the moraine and along the way we found several new meteorites. The weather was cold, at -20 C, with a modest wind of about 10-12 knots. It seems to be getting colder. At around noon, the wind kicked up to 20 knots and the snow began to drift. Working conditions became harsh and the visibility quickly dropped. It was time to head back to camp. Once there, Jim made the call that we were done for the day due to the weather.

The G-058 team has been very lucky this year with regard to bad weather and tent days. We have only had three full tent days and two half days. Tent days are generally blizzard or wind-storm conditions where the visibility is too low for safe travel and effective searching. We had all heard the stories of being stuck in the tent for days on end and getting quite bored, so we brought lots of books, games, crafts, movies and music for the dreaded tent days. In fact, the occasional tent day has been a nice break from the hard outdoor work of meteorite hunting. For example, I have been reading, writing, drawing and playing my guitar on tent days. Today, we played games in the afternoon and Stan cooked a seafood-chowder dinner for the entire team.

Tent days provide a chance to reflect on our expedition and our life here in this very remote field camp. Sitting here, with the wind shaking the tent and drifting snow piling up all around us, one can’t help but be amazed at our life here on the ice. With the equipment, supplies and expert guiding by Shaun Norman, we are warm, safe and remarkably comfortable. The hard work outdoors, combined with our warm sleeping bags, have us all sleeping long and well. The air that we breath is the cleanest and freshest on earth. This is a stark contrast from the winter air back home in Tempe. The water that we drink, which comes from melting glacial ice that is between ten and hundreds of thousands of years old, is the purest on earth. There are no germs here other than those that we brought with us. No one has been sick and no one is likely to get sick because we are not being exposed to any new germs. There is no Internet, no email, no Facebook, no news and no fiscal cliffs to worry about. We live in the moment, only concerned with our mission of finding and collecting meteorites and staying safe and warm in one of the most remote field sites on earth. Sitting out a storm in my tent, I am so grateful to be on the ANSMET Team, living so well in this breath-takingly beautiful wilderness.